Re: cvsweb news

On Tue, 10 Mar 2026 at 05:09, Stuart Henderson <stu.lists@spacehopper.org> wrote:

On 2026-03-10, Stuart Henderson <stu.lists@spacehopper.org> wrote:
> On 2026-03-10, Stuart Henderson <stu.lists@spacehopper.org> wrote:
>>
>>> It can be done by a 3-line nginx.conf, after all, which wouldn't be
>>> spawning any new processes to process the requests.
>>
>> it's not running nginx.
>
> also, there's no mapping for this type of url
>
> https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.bin/ssh/PROTOCOL?annotate=OPENBSD_7_1
>
> as it would need to go to
>
> https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/annotate/src/Makefile,v?rev=1.136&sort=File
>
> also no equivalent to the ";content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup" links
> which have the commit message as well as file contents.

0. Doing extra bot verification before these sorts of redirects would be pointless, because many of those broken bots don't even handle these sorts of redirects correctly in the first place, so, they'll probably be ignoring them in the first place.

1. I would say the number of direct versionless links to cvsweb is far greater than these corner-case examples, yet even the direct paramless links are broken.  Something that could have easily been done in Apache with mod_rewrite in 1996, is missing in OpenBSD in 2026.

2. Tag support should probably be added later on, so, I don't think that's a good example, but even if something is unsupported, it could simply provide a 300 Multiple Choices response — free with nginx.

3. For any feature of the old cvsweb unsupported by the new cvsweb, the response could be 300 Multiple Choices with links to other services that may provide the support.  Again, just few lines of `return 300` config in nginx.

4. The fact that these sorts of things can be done in 3 lines of nginx.conf, indicates just how basic this sort of a URI feature really is in a webserver.  If it's not supported by whichever server or framework being used, then maybe said server should be replaced with nginx?  Apache has had these features with mod_rewrite since the mid-1990s, and it's basically also just 3 lines of code even with Apache.

 

>
> (I'm trying to figure out suitable URLs to fix all the broken links on
> www.openbsd.org and it's pretty rough...)

This is 100% a wrong way to do this.

How do you plan to fix all the PDFs?  Conference paper presentations?  Slides?

This should really be fixed upstream on the web server level, once and for everyone.

 

and it expects https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src (no trailing /) for dir
listings, and issues wrong links if you use https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/

That would seem like a bug to me.

C.