[darcs-devel] [issue757] darcs2 fails to identify the repository on some restrictive http servers.

[Nicolas Pouillard]

Excerpts from David Roundy's message of Sat Mar 22 18:54:32 +0100 2008:
> On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 05:43:27PM -0000, Nicolas Pouillard wrote:
> > With darcs2 doing
> > 
> >   darcs get http://www.lri.fr/~sozeau/repos/coq/fingertrees
> > 
> > Shows that asking for the _darcs/format file returns an HTML error since the
> > format file doesn't exist.
> >
> > I would like to help but I don't know what would be the right fix. There is a
> > trade-off between reporting parsing errors and conclude that the file is not
> > reliable and so fall back to darcs1 repo format.
> 
> Darcs handles file-not-found errors just fine.  The problem is that this
> server isn't returning a 404 error as it's supposed to, instead it's giving
> a 302 response.  I'm not sure what's the best workaround for buggy web
> servers.  The simplest fix is to just create a format file on the server,
> or perhaps to use a less buggy file server.

I  understand  that's  basically  a  "not our bug" case, but it's annoying and
perhaps some heuristic could help us.

> If neither of these are reasonable options, I suppose we could try to hack
> up some sort of workaround, maybe searching for the text "This page is not
> available"... but that's a *seriously* ugly hack.  We can't just ignore
> format files that we don't understand, because the entire point of the
> format file is that when it's present and we don't understand it, we know
> that it's a format we don't understand, and can thus fail with a nice error
> message.

Perhaps  searching for any XML tag would be less ugly, printing a warning that
this XML answer has been considered as a "File not found".

-- 
Nicolas Pouillard aka Ertai
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