[gopher] Re: UMN gopher client weird behavior

[David Allen <s2mdalle@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Jan 10, 2001 at 12:02:58PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> 
> Cameron Kaiser <spectre@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 
> > > Jon Nelson (the guy behing pygopherd) has been asking me why UMN
> > > gopher is sending weird things to his server.  I did some checking and
> > > it looked to me that the TAB $ was a gopher+ism -- dunno why it would
> > > try to send that as the first thing ever, before it knows it's
> > > speaking to a gopher+ server.  Is this a bug?  Does anyone else do it?
> > 
> > David and I have discussed that behaviour before and we consider it a bug,
> > too. Bucktooth deals with it by simply sending a stock gopher+ response that
> > forces UMN-gopher to use regular gopher requests.
> 
> What specific response is it that you send in this instance?

I think in particular Cameron had mentioned that gopher always sends
Gopher+ requests by default.  I haven't read anything anywhere about
using $ as a terminator, just '!' and '?' (for information available
and ask block, respectively) after the port field.

I do consider sending gopher+ requests by default to be broken
behavior.  I'm betting that most servers can handle it even if they
don't understand it, because the rest of the information that they do
need is still there in the same format, but I just consider it rude to
speak a nonstandard protocol.

If I get some time, I'll look into what is doing it in the source and
possibly commit a change to fix it if it's relatively straightforward.

-- 
David Allen
http://opop.nols.com/
----------------------------------------
99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
fix one bug, compile it again...
101 little bugs in the code....