Re: [RFC] Implementing gitweb output caching - issues to solve

From: Olaf Alders <olaf@wundersolutions.com>
Date: Dec 10, 2010, 03:17 UTC
Message-ID: <88CF82F1-0363-47B4-8C6F-AE4A2DA1714B@wundersolutions.com>
In-Reply-To: <20101209225211.GA20426@burratino>

On 2010-12-09, at 5:52 PM, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

Show 27 quoted lines

> Jakub Narebski wrote:
> 
>> In my rewrite
>> 
>>  [PATCHv6 17/24] gitweb: Show appropriate "Generating..." page when regenerating cache
>>  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/163052/focus=163040
>>  http://repo.or.cz/w/git/jnareb-git.git/commitdiff/48679f7985ccda16dc54fda97790841bab4a0ba2#patch1
>> 
>> (see the browser_is_robot() subroutine:
>> 
>>  http://repo.or.cz/w/git/jnareb-git.git/blob/48679f7985ccda16dc54fda97790841bab4a0ba2:/gitweb/gitweb.perl#l870
>> 
>> I use HTTP::BrowserDetect package if available and it's ->robot() method.
>> 
>> The fallback is to use *whitelist*, assuming that it would be better to
>> not show "Generating..." page rather than download the wrong thing.
>> I also guess that most (all?) web browsers use "Mozilla compatibile"
>> somewhere in their User-Agent string, thus matching 'Mozilla'.
> 
> Interesting.  http://www.user-agents.org/ seems to suggest that many
> robots do use Mozilla (though I don't think it's worth bending over
> backwards to help them see the page correctly).
> 
> HTTP::BrowserDetect uses a blacklist as far as I can tell.  Maybe in
> the long term it would be nice to add a whitelist ->human() method.
> 
> Cc-ing Olaf Alders for ideas.

Thanks for including me in this.  :)  I'm certainly open to patching the module, but I'm not 100% clear on how  you would want to implement this.  How is ->is_human different from !->is_robot?  To clarify, I should say that from the snippet above, I'm not 100% clear on what the problem is which needs to be solved.

Olaf

-- Olaf Alders olaf@wundersolutions.com

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