[gopher] Re: PyGopherd and Gopher+

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Dec 31, 2005 at 09:56:42AM -0600, Benn Newman wrote:

> Since all you client people say you don't make Gopher+ clients
> because there aren't any servers taking advantage of it, no more! :)

Hmm, who are all these client people? ;-)

In general, let me say that after implementing at least part of
Gopher+ in PyGopherd, I've come to the conclusion that it isn't very
"Gophery".  It's rather complex in some cases and there are a lot of
special cases.

> But, I have some questions about how things work in PyGopherd.
> 
> How do I get multiple views of an item? I have a client.png file on
> my server; I tried just having a client.gif, but that did not work.

PyGopherd doesn't provide any automated support for multiple views of
a single file like UMN Gopherd did, because this feature was broken in
every way I could see it.  UMN gopher client didn't handle it well,
and things were even worse for gopher0 clients, who generally didn't
get offered any option.

That said, you can probably specify a custom +VIEWS block using the
PyGopherd general method for specifying custom Gopher+ blocks, but I
have never tested that.

> And more the way of bugs, for extended attributes, like abstracts,
> if you define a mapping for example admin, it would overwrite the
> other information for that attribute. I found this out by trying to
> define an items copyright in the ADMIN block. I remember reading in
> gopherd, that you can have a diretory have a different admin,
> how/can you do this in PyGopherd? The only way I have figured out
> only does the main directory.

You could create a .admin file in the directory, I think.  (Again,
untested, but that should do the trick.)

> PyGopherd also defines the wrong item type for sounds, if you read
> the Gopher+ spe, it is not s, this is also incorrect in the UMN
> curses client.

It does the correct thing according to gopherd(8).  As far as I can
tell, nobody actually follows what the Gopher+ chapter says on that,
so I consider the Gopher+ chapter broken.

> And while I am complaining about everything :), in bucktooth and
> PyGopherd, a selector manualy marked as a Gopher+ server is ignored
> in gophermaps.

Good point.  I guess I never anticipated people using gophermaps with
Gopher+.

BTW, if anybody would like to send in patches for pygopherd, you can
check out its darcs repository with:

darcs get --partial http://darcs.complete.org/pygopherd

or

darcs get --partial http://darcs.complete.org/gopher

for UMN curses client.

As you hack away, use "darcs record" to commit your changes, and then
run "darcs send" to send me a patchset by e-mail.

-- John