Date: Wed, 4 Mar 1998 22:50:40 -0700 (MST) From: Marc Slemko <marcs@znep.com> To: nik@iii.co.uk Cc: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: DEVFS/SLICE and SOFT UPDATE patches. Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.95.980304224507.24021A-100000@alive.znep.com> In-Reply-To: <19980225102152.50924@iii.co.uk>
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On Wed, 25 Feb 1998 nik@iii.co.uk wrote: > On Wed, Feb 25, 1998 at 02:52:23AM +0000, Terry Lambert wrote: > > Use http://www.freebsd.org/~julian/ if you are using a brain-damaged > > browser. For some reason, the trailing "/" is important to the WWW > > server on FreeeBSD.org... > > > > This is a job for... Variant Symbolic Links! <Dut Dut Da!> > > Uh, no it isn't. It's a job for people to start writing URLs properly. > > If you're referring to a directory (as the URL above is) then you must > include the trailing slash. Otherwise, the webserver thinks you're trying > to retrieve a file of that name instead. > > When the web server realises that the file is not there, it will either > > a) Return the appropriate "File not found" code to the browser > > or > > b) Speculatively put a '/' on the end and try again. > > I don't think any web servers currently do (b), but I wouldn't stake my > life on it. > > When a server responds with (a) the browser may or may not speculatively > put a '/' on the end and resubmit the request. Most browsers do indeed do > this. Some obviously don't, and I presume these are the 'brain damaged ones' > referred to above. Erm... no. If the request doesn't have a trailing '/', then it is asking for a file in the directory above the desired directory. A web server is free to give them the correct answer that it doesn't exist. However, nearly all web servers (including Apache) will decide to be nice to the user and send a redirect to the client refering them to the URL with the trailing '/'. The client does not, should not, and must not dumbly try adding trailing '/'s. The normal cause for the case where a URL without a trailing '/' breaks but one with it works is because the server is configured incorrectly so what it thinks of as its server name and reality are different, so the client can't connect to the server name sent in the redirection. This does not depend on the client in any way, shape, or form, unless they are so dumb they both can't handle redirects automatically and don't properly display the message body when they can't handle them. "Variant Symbolic Links" are irrelevant and can not fix the problem for the same reason that the server can't just send the document instead of sending a redirect: then the client's concept of a relative URL would be based in the wrong directory. There is no need for a fix for anything because nothing is broken. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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