Re: [WWWOFFLE-Users] RFE: don't create directory if host doesn't exist

[Matus UHLAR - fantomas]

> > > Matus UHLAR - fantomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > > > I often paste string from clipboard to a mozilla browser, which
> > > > results into tryting to open URL pointed at (it's very good feature
> > > > of mozilla).
> > > > 
> > > > When this happens, wwwoffle creates directory for the "host", even
> > > > if it does not exist. It means that I get many useless directories
> > > > (with error messages) created in spool directory.
> > > > 
> > > > Could wwwoffle skip this behaviour, and try to validate hostname (at
> > > > least in online mode w/o paren tproxy set up) before creating the
> > > > directory?

On 05.04.06 19:07, Andrew M. Bishop wrote:
> WWWOFFLE has no way to know if the URL that is asked for is really
> wanted or just an accident.  This means that it has to try and fetch
> the URL even if this fails in the case that you describe.

of course, I understand this.

> When DNS fails there can be lots of reasons:
[...]
>  * The user typed in a wrong name (the host never has and never will exist).
[...]
> They will want to see the error message because it is important to
> them to know that the host is not accessible today.  The problem is
> that there is no way to know that the host does not exist, only that
> it is not known by DNS today.

I think it could. Afaik, DNS returns different result if it received
authoritative answer "host does not exist", than if it is not able to
resolve hostname in the given time. In this case, (and probably in the
others) I don't see any reason in creating the directory for the host.

and I think it's not very easy to code...

> What you are asking for is for WWWOFFLE to behave differently for one
> special case (online, no parent proxy) than all other cases.

I would say it different: Don't create directory if you have no data to
fetch. If we have parent proxy which returns the data, OK, I can't do
anything with this. If we are offline, request will only be recorded in
outgoing, no directory is created (right?).
But if we are trying to fetch data and we find out that there's nowhere to
fetch them from, let's just skip it and return an error message.

> This will add confusion because error messages will be cached for some
> hosts but not other depending exactly when they were requested and the
> state of the configuration file.

I don't see much possible confusion here - just different kinds of error
messages, which are still different when user does or does not use a proxy

-- 
Matus UHLAR - fantomas, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; http://www.fantomas.sk/
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