[Slackbuilds-users] [uzbl-dev] Problem downloading gzipped tar files

[Donald Allen]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 8:38 AM, Donald Allen <donaldcallen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Robby --
>
> Below is a response from one of the uzbl developers to a message I
> sent them, which unfortunately is truncated in his response. The issue
> is that with the uzbl browser, which is built on top of webkitgtk,
> when I download slackbuild tar files, they get gunzipped, though the
> locally stored file is still named foo.tar.gz. As mentioned below, I
> do not see this behavior when downloading .tar.gz files from other
> sites, nor do I see it with Firefox. His message explains all this,
> including asserting that slackbuilds.org sending "Content-Encoding:
> gzip" is incorrect. If you agree that this is an error (in my
> experience, the uzbl guys know what they are talking about when it
> comes to browser matters, web protocols, etc.), please put fixing this
> on your to-do list.

I just did a bit of reading on this and it's pretty clear that he's
right. "Content-Encoding: gzip" asks the browser to gunzip what the
server sends. Whatever Firefox is doing is a heuristic, a hack to
avoid uncompressing .tar.gz files even if the server says
"Content-Encoding: gzip" incorrectly.

/Don

>
> By the way, my earlier message about the flash-plugin slackbuild may
> have been a result of this problem. I don't remember if I tried
> downloading it with firefox. If I didn't, the file may actually have
> been ok and was delivered uncompressed to me because of the above
> issue.
>
> Thanks --
> /Don
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Dan Winship <danw at gnome.org>
> Date: Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 8:17 AM
> Subject: Re: [uzbl-dev] Problem downloading gzipped tar files
> To: Donald Allen <donaldcallen at gmail.com>
> Cc: uzbl-dev at lists.uzbl.org
>
>
> On 04/06/2011 11:24 PM, Donald Allen wrote:
>> uzbl, what I end up with is the tar file gunzip-ed, but it is still
>> named foo.tar.gz. For example, go to
>>
>> http://slackbuilds.org/repository/13.1/academic/ess/
>>
>> and click the 'ess.tar.gz' link. Unless there's something about my
>> setup that's causing this, you will get an ess.tar.gz file that is
>> actually an uncompressed tar file. Doing the same with Firefox 3.6.15
>> results in a
>> gzipped tar file, as one would expect.
>
>> I do not see this behavior when downloading gzipped tar files from
>> some other sites, e.g., gnucash.org.
>
> It's because slackbuilds is sending "Content-Encoding: gzip", which is
> wrong. Other browsers work around this, but WebKitGTK doesn't.
>
> There's a bug at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=613361. We
> never got around to figuring out exactly how Firefox is special-casing
> this, so it never got fixed.
>
> -- Dan
>