Re: [gentoo-dev] packages.gentoo.org lives!

[Jan Kundrát]

Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> - Using the ';' as an argument separator in the old side is not a valid
>   query argument separator, and there are URLs out there that have added
>   further arguments using it, complicating parsing.

What is source of your definition of "valid query argument separator"?

> - See also RFC1738: 'Within the <path> and <searchpart> components, "/",
>   ";", "?" are reserved.'

My copy of RFC1738 says (end of section 2.2):

   Many URL schemes reserve certain characters for a special meaning:
   their appearance in the scheme-specific part of the URL has a
   designated semantics. If the character corresponding to an octet is
   reserved in a scheme, the octet must be encoded.  The characters ";",
   "/", "?", ":", "@", "=" and "&" are the characters which may be
   reserved for special meaning within a scheme. No other characters may
   be reserved within a scheme.

I wasn't able to find your quote in that file.

> - Having a single valid URL for a given resource greatly improves cache
>   hit rates (and we do use caching heavily on the new site, 60% hit rate
>   at the moment, see further down as well).

Redirecting clients to new URLs would give you perfect caching as well.

> - The old parsing and variable usage code was the source of multiple
>   bugs as well as the security issue that shuttered the site.

Only because it passed the raw, unescaped values directly to shell,
which is of course badly broken.

> - I _want_ old sites to change to using the new form, which I do
>   advertise as being permanent resource URLs (as well as being much
>   easier to construct, take any "[CAT/]PN[-PF]" and slap it onto the
>   base URL, and you are done).

Which isn't a reason for breaking old links, IMHO.

> That said, if somebody wants to point me to something decent so that
> Squid can rewrite the URLs WITH the query parameters (the built-in squid
> stuff seems to ignore them) and hit the cache, and that can add a big
> warning at the top of the page, I'd be happy to use it for a transition
> period, just like the RSS URLs (which are redirected until January 2008,
> but only because they are automated, and not browsed by humans).

Now that's something that sound reasonable. Why limit the period and
don't provide it forever?

Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate your (and others') efforts on
getting p.g.o back up again, but I don't agree at all with reasons given
in this mail. If you said "because I didn't have time to do that" or
"I'm not interested in that", I wouldn't argue (but might try to get in
touch with you and provide patches fixing the stuff).

Cheers,
-jkt

-- 
cd /local/pub && more beer > /dev/mouth