[gopher] Updated Gopher RFC

[Kim Holviala]

On 9.5.2012 8:50, Mateusz Viste wrote:

> I am not really a fan of such brutal connexion closing... It's what
> HTTP/1.0 do (or HTTP/1.1 with connection: close header).
>
> The nice thing about the dot is that it provides a very easy
> information to the client - whether or not the menu has been
> completely transferred.

Please, no top-posting - it makes this discussion very hard to follow.

Anyway, as for the lone dot, I really wasn't talking about menus at all. 
Gophernicus does end menus with a dot, and there's no problem with that 
and I'm not suggesting that we remove that.

This is the real problem:

gopher://gophernicus.org/0/archive
gopher://gophernicus.org/9/archive

The Law(tm) says that the first transfer should end with a dot and the 
second should not. Sounds simple enough, right? Only how in the hell is 
the server supposed to know whether the client expected type "0" dotted 
text or type "9" undotted binary? Even my Gophernicus, which by leaps 
and bounds the best gopher server the universe has ever seen, cannot 
reliably determine between the above two cases (in in above case it 
assumes type "0").

So, should the server break rule number #1 and never send a dot? Or 
should it break rule number #2 and always send the dot? I chose breaking 
rule #1 because that way binaries won't break...



- Kim