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Re: User URLs in setup.exe


----- Original Message -----
From: "John Marshall" <johnm@falch.net>
To: "Robert Collins" <robert.collins@syncretize.net>

> It sounds very good to me!  So add syntax (or just more parsing because
> it's already there?) to mirrors.lst so setup.exe could display stuff
> like
> http://foonet.no  (Norway)
>
> Cool :-).
>
> I'm not sure how the friendly extra information would get into
> last-mirror though.  If a last-mirror is from mirrors.lst then you've
> got the information in mirrors.lst anyway, and otherwise it's a User URL
> and you'd have to get the user to type it in, which seems over-the-top.

Thats why there is the clause to only show friendly info if it exists. Thus
user URL's show unfriendly details :}.

> That change seems like something easily big enough for HEAD, and
> probably it'd be over the threshold that I'd need to be copyright-
> assigned.  That's doable, but it'll take time of course.

Copyright assignment isn't needed for setup.exe. The only requirement is
that you have the right to licence the code you've created under the GPL.
(i.e. you may not have that right if you have an IP assignment clause in
your employment contract).

> In the meantime, we have what I think is a serious UI bug in the 2002-06
> branch:  people can't correct typos in User URLs without manipulating
> last-mirror in a way that needs some expertise.
>
> One way to fix that would be to change #3 (as defined in my previous
> posting) so that adding an URL that happens to have the same key as an
> existing one *does* overwrite it.  I think [1] the following surprisingly
> simple patch achieves this:
>
> --- site.cc.orig Thu Jun 27 02:09:10 2002
> +++ site.cc Thu Jun 27 02:24:41 2002
> @@ -409,6 +409,7 @@ bool SitePage::OnMessageCmd (int id, HWN
>       if (&listobj != newsite)
>         {
>   // That site was already registered
> + listobj = *newsite;
>   delete
>     newsite;
>         }

Should do. I'll play with this a little later. And yes I agree that this is
a reasonable interim step.

> > I think this is the wrong thing to do. Us users shouldn't need to
> > understand url encoding, which is why trailing '/'s and spaces are
> > currently preserved. (because http://foo.com/cygwin//setup.ini is a
> > valid URL different from http://foo.com/cygwin/setup.ini).
>
> Sure it's valid, and I agree with you, but to be really convincing
> you'd have to demonstrate a situation in which someone actually *wanted*
> that :-).  It's a UI question:  what proportion of the times that a user
> types a trailing space or slash (so ends up with "[...]//setup.ini") do
> they actually *intend* to do that?

Yes, lets turn it on it's head though: how does a user that *does* want that
enter it via the GUI if we strip the final /?

> However, it occurs to me that the real solution to that is not to muck
> with setup.exe, but for me to play more games with HTTP redirection on
> my server.  So that's fine.

Yep :}.

Rob


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