[gopher] Gophernicus Server 0.6 released

[Mike Hebel]

On Apr 11, 2010, at 11:04 PM 4/11/10, Kim Holviala wrote:

> On 2010-04-12 05:40, Mike Hebel wrote:
>
>> Since I'm not completely set up under pygopherd I could easily be
>> convinced to switch. Will Gophernicus Server build on NetBSD  
>> Sparc64? Or
>> is that something I need to test and let _you_ know about? ;-)
>
> (I teach AIX courses for living so I'm allowed to say this :-D )
>
> If it works on AIX it works on *ANYTHING*. Seriously, you can't find  
> a more fucked up Unix than AIX. And since I've already tested  
> x86_64, POWER3, POWER4 and ARMv5 I'm pretty sure it works on Sparc64  
> too.

No argument here.  I have quite a few friends who have some experience  
with AIX.

> Hmm, maybe I'll fire up one of the sparcs in the trash pile today to  
> find out? Hee hee.... Actually, I was planning on testing with IRIX/ 
> mips this week so I might as well install NetBSD somewhere and test  
> with it too.

I wonder if it'll build on NetBSD Cobalt...

> Yes, my employer lets me do cool stuff when I don't have customer  
> things or courses going on.

That is indubitably cool. :-)

>> I'm assuming since you're using C it's faster and lighter than  
>> something
>> like pygopherd?
>
> Faster and much lighter yes, but the feature sets differ. You just  
> have to pick the one with features that you need - pygoperd didn't  
> suit my needs (and neither did any other existing server) so I made  
> my own.

pygopherd has been the closest so far.  I wanted something lightweight  
that would run on almost anything but Gofish gave me hell processing  
directories, Grumpy only runs on Linux and Windows, and the others  
hadn't appeared to have been maintained for years.  pygopherd at the  
time seemed like the only option.

> The features I wanted that others I could find didn't:
>
> * Full UTF-8 support with optional downconversion to US-ASCII

I lose geek points for not knowing what this means. ;-)

> * Full IPv6 support

It's interesting to see that a server for one of the older protocols  
is being developed to work with one of the newer ones still not fully  
implemented everywhere.

> * Full CGI support

That in and of itself is just plain useful.  But I thought Gopher  
supported CGI out of the box so to speak or am I taking too much  
allergy medicine?

> * Written in C  (I despise perl/python daemons)

I'm not a fan of interpreted languages for things like this either.   
It's annoying from many standpoints especially a dependency one.

> Of course, most people would say that since Gophernicus is written  
> in C it must be full of buffer overflows :-) but I don't think  
> that's the case. It's got integrated strlcpy() from OpenBSD and I  
> think Theo knows his stuff.

Theo is Theo and I trust him to be such.  People forget that because  
he acts the way he does we have one of the most secure operating  
systems on the planet that runs on a considerable chunk of  
architecture out there.  That is no small feat and I highly respect  
that.

--
Mike


"All we wanna do is eat your brains! We're not unreasonable, I mean no  
one's gonna eat your eyes." - Re: Brains, Jonathan Coultan