[gopher] Mozilla bugs about Gopher, and a dangerous one

[Stegozor <stegozor@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Hope you had a happy easter. As for me, I spent my time on Cameron's 
Veronica 2 and on bugzilla.mozilla.org. I found some bugs and I'd like 
to share my thoughts. Here comes the list.


https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=351748
(Remove UI for Gopher proxy settings)

This one - the most recent bug about the Gopher protocol - is pretty 
dangerous. It is about removing the user interface for Gopher proxy 
settings. Even worse, the last suggestion is: "let's keep it until we 
completely remove Gopher support". IMHO, someone should definitely 
defend the presence of Gopher in Mozilla codebase. Add yourself in the 
CC list (don't vote for this one! ;), protest, do something... I was 
about to do so, but I'm an eternal newbie and anything but a code wizard 
so I think other people on this mailing list could do that much better 
than me. It would be really stupid if the recently corrected Gopher 
support was abandoned :(


Well, here follow some other gopher related bugs filed in Mozilla's 
bugzilla. Fortunately, their goal is to enhance Gopher support, not to 
suppress it. All in all, there are not so many bugs for gopher, but 
unfortunately, these bugs do not have many votes either. So my humble 
suggestion is that you visit and vote for those who seem important to 
you. Creating an account on bugzilla is easy and you won't get any spam 
because of the comments you might leave, so go on.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194220
(Bug 194220 -- [meta] gopher)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158888
(implement better handling for gopher on non default ports)

This one deserves a remark. I've spent a lot of time since the last week 
to find gopher sites for the gopher category of dmoz. When I landed on 
gopher://gopher.hal3000.cx I tried the search engines. Unfortunately, no 
matter what the query was, I was taken to the homepage of the gopher 
each time I pressed Enter. I ended up thinking that this was another 
unmaintained server. To be completely sure, I wrote a mail to Chris, and 
then thanks to his explanations I discovered that this was a problem 
with Firefox and the way it handles ports (Lynx works fine for 
instance). Hence, a call to all gophermasters: as long as this bug is 
not corrected, IMHO all gopher search engines should stick with port 70, 
simply because Firefox is the browser newbies like me who land on 
gopherspace will be most likely using, let alone the fact that it's 
recommended on many gopher sites. Be newbie friendly, copy floodgap, 
stick with port 70 whenever possible, and vote for this bug please.


https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83881
(gopher: preference to shut off sorting)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=273459
(most gopher-*.gif images are unused)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=202196
(wrong protocol for host names containing "gopher")

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326034
(Gopher module shouldn't try to interpret text into URLs)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=284558
(GOPHER protocol support needs improvement (Save as "binary"))

Should this bug be reopened? I tried with .zip files at JumpJet, but I'm 
not sure I did exactly what the bug report explains.

Finally, to have a look at all open gopher related bugs click on 
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=gopher
There are less than 20 including those already mentioned, so don't be 
afraid :)

-- 
Feel free to correct my English ;)