Re: Tomcat bug 53814 - PDF plugin in IE cannot download correctly

2012-10-16 Thread David Wall


On 10/15/2012 6:37 PM, 孙文 wrote:

You are not suitable the open source community and you are a selfish guy.



Wonderful, helpful and insightful!

I egregiously suggested that reverting a line of code back to 7.0.26, 
which was also standards-compliant, would have been easy and would have 
helped many who use PDF and IE, an apparently selfish request even 
though I rarely use IE myself.


It seemed practical and helpful to me, in the spirit of open source, a 
community I respect and contribute to daily.


By the way, the web.xml change we made was suggested in the bug report 
and seems to resolve it for our IE site visitors.


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Re: Tomcat bug 53814 - PDF plugin in IE cannot download correctly

2012-10-16 Thread Mark Thomas
On 16/10/2012 18:54, David Wall wrote:
 By the way, the web.xml change we made was suggested in the bug report
 and seems to resolve it for our IE site visitors.

Glad to head that disabling support for range requests works. That seems
like a reasonable short-term workaround until someone experiencing this
error contacts Adobe.

Mark


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Re: Tomcat bug 53814 - PDF plugin in IE cannot download correctly

2012-10-15 Thread Konstantin Kolinko
2012/10/15 David Wall d.w...@computer.org:
 In researching a bug our users are now suffering, I found that it was
 reported already as *Bug 53814- Could not display PDF file on Tomcat
 7.0.27 above.*

 Sadly, it also shows that's it's considered invalid and won't be fixed
 because the change made between 7.0.26 and 7.0.27 is standards compliant.

 That's a rather unsatisfying answer considering it affects PDFs and IE, a
 rather common combination.

 The change was made in the 7.0.27 release, causing the bug to appear.  Yes,
 the bug is in fact in the PDF reader of IE, but it is sad when a bug release
 (not going from 7.0 to 7.1, but 7.0.26 to 7.0.27) introduces new problems.

 Putting the space separator back in seems so straightforward unless removing
 the space actually fixes something else. It is not clear in the bug report
 if the change was made for a particular reason or not since bug 52811
 doesn't appear to be an issue with 'boundary' at all.

 It is not clear that having the space would not be compliant with the spec.
 The comment in the bug report even says that all of the examples in the
 specification have a whitespace before parameter.

 I guess I can understand a change like this that will break working systems
 if the change were required to be standards compliant and
 standards-compliant browsers had trouble because of the space being there,
 but if not, it shouldn't occur in such a late patch release (7.0.27) rather
 than a new minor release like 7.1.

 I hope that keeping things working is the prevailing idea behind patch
 releases.  Of course, it's not surprising that IE would be the one browser
 to have this problem handling standards-compliant syntax!


The essence of Comment 5 in bug 53814 is that one has to contact Adobe
first for their comment.

Thus far (a month passed) it seems that nobody who is affected by this
issue have have tried that.


Best regards,
Konstantin Kolinko

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Re: Tomcat bug 53814 - PDF plugin in IE cannot download correctly

2012-10-15 Thread Christopher Schultz
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Hash: SHA1

David,

On 10/15/12 2:04 PM, David Wall wrote:
 In researching a bug our users are now suffering, I found that it
 was reported already as *Bug 53814- Could not display PDF file
 on Tomcat 7.0.27 above.*
 
 Sadly, it also shows that's it's considered invalid and won't be
 fixed because the change made between 7.0.26 and 7.0.27 is
 standards compliant.
 
 That's a rather unsatisfying answer considering it affects PDFs and
 IE, a rather common combination.

You didn't like the answer file a separate enhancement request and
we'll handle that separately? If you can't be bothered to file an
enhancement request then how do you expect anyone to bother to fix this?

 The change was made in the 7.0.27 release, causing the bug to
 appear. Yes, the bug is in fact in the PDF reader of IE, but it is
 sad when a bug release (not going from 7.0 to 7.1, but 7.0.26 to
 7.0.27) introduces new problems.

By all means, downgrade. Unfortunately, you'll have to suffer all the
regressions where fixed bugs make the new versions of Tomcat
incompatible with old versions.

All new releases could potentially introduce new problems. This new
behavior is not a regression. It is standards-compliant. The client is
broken. Anyone can write a broken client. Should Tomcat implement
fixes for all broken clients?

 Putting the space separator back in seems so straightforward
 unless removing the space actually fixes something else.

Care to test with all clients and get back to us? This is what
standards are for.

You're right: the change is straightforward. So is filing an
enhancement request.

 It is not clear in the bug report if the change was made for a 
 particular reason or not since bug 52811 doesn't appear to be an 
 issue with 'boundary' at all.
 
 It is not clear that having the space would not be compliant with
 the spec.  The comment in the bug report even says that all of the
 examples in the specification have a whitespace before parameter.

There is no argument whether the space would or not be a spec
violation. The question is why the Adobe PDF plug-in requires the
space to be there (which is not compliant).

 I guess I can understand a change like this that will break
 working systems if the change were required to be standards
 compliant and standards-compliant browsers had trouble because of
 the space being there, but if not, it shouldn't occur in such a
 late patch release (7.0.27) rather than a new minor release like
 7.1.

I think you're being overly sensitive. You can't expect Tomcat to fix
(or break) nothing between 7.0 and 7.1.

 I hope that keeping things working is the prevailing idea behind
 patch releases.  Of course, it's not surprising that IE would be
 the one browser to have this problem handling standards-compliant
 syntax!

It's not MSIE's fault, here. It's the PDF plug-in from Adobe (who
often takes liberties with standards as well).

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Re: Tomcat bug 53814 - PDF plugin in IE cannot download correctly

2012-10-15 Thread Mark Thomas
On 15/10/2012 19:04, David Wall wrote:

As the person who closed Bug 53814 as invalid, I thought it would be
useful to expand on my reasoning for doing so.

 In researching a bug our users are now suffering, I found that it was
 reported already as *Bug 53814- Could not display PDF file on Tomcat
 7.0.27 above.*
 
 Sadly, it also shows that's it's considered invalid and won't be fixed
 because the change made between 7.0.26 and 7.0.27 is standards compliant.

There is more to it than that.

It has been a general rule for as long as I have been involved in the
project that Tomcat does not implement workarounds for bugs in clients,
JVMs, operating systems, databases or any other component with which it
interacts. There are several reasons for this position. In no particular
order:
- the workarounds are an additional maintenance burden
- if is more efficient to fix the root cause than to implement a
workaround in every application that interacts with the buggy one
- it encourages standards compliance which is a good thing
- why would anyone volunteer to clean up someone else's mess?
- it isn't unknown for different applications to have conflicting bugs
that can't both be worked around

There have, however, been exceptions to the rule...

 That's a rather unsatisfying answer considering it affects PDFs and IE,
 a rather common combination.

Bugs that affect large numbers of users and are from vendors that are
known to be very slow fixing them (or who just ignore them) have been
workaround in the past. They are assessed on a case by case basis. Since
there is no evidence that a) Adobe have been made aware of this bug and
b) Adobe have refused to fix this bug then I will remain -1 on
implementing a workaround.

 The change was made in the 7.0.27 release, causing the bug to appear. 
 Yes, the bug is in fact in the PDF reader of IE, but it is sad when a
 bug release (not going from 7.0 to 7.1, but 7.0.26 to 7.0.27) introduces
 new problems.

The Tomcat team generally test that changes are standards compliant. We
can't possibly test every possible client to ensure that Tomcat is
consistent with their particular, incorrect version of the standard.

 Putting the space separator back in seems so straightforward unless
 removing the space actually fixes something else. It is not clear in the
 bug report if the change was made for a particular reason or not since
 bug 52811 doesn't appear to be an issue with 'boundary' at all.

Yes the work around is simple. That has little impact on the likelihood
of it being implemented.

 It is not clear that having the space would not be compliant with the
 spec.  The comment in the bug report even says that all of the examples
 in the specification have a whitespace before parameter.

Adding the space is standard compliant.

 I guess I can understand a change like this that will break working
 systems if the change were required to be standards compliant and
 standards-compliant browsers had trouble because of the space being
 there, but if not, it shouldn't occur in such a late patch release
 (7.0.27) rather than a new minor release like 7.1.

Tomcat 7.0.26 is compliant with RFC 2616.
Tomcat 7.0.27 is complaint with RFC 2616.

A system that does not follow the standard is not fully working. It just
happens to work with some combinations. I could equally say it was
responsibility of the developers depending on the Adobe plug-in to fully
test that that component was standards compliant and that the problems
they are now seeing are the direct result of their failure to do so.
That would be just as unreasonable as expecting the Tomcat team to do
such testing.

 I hope that keeping things working is the prevailing idea behind patch
 releases.  Of course, it's not surprising that IE would be the one
 browser to have this problem handling standards-compliant syntax!

The primary aims of each point release are to fix bugs without
introducing regressions. Regressions do happen and I have been guilty of
creating a few of them. However, BZ 53814 is not a regression; it is a
bug in a third party component.

Mark


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