Date: Wed, 2 May 2007 17:32:49 +0200
From: Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net>
To: gopher@complete.org
Subject: [gopher] Re: Gopherfs and stuff
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Good day.

Am Wed, 2 May 2007 05:40:04 -0700 (PDT)
schrieb Cameron Kaiser <spectre@floodgap.com>:

> > I am not running a gopherd on r-36.net because of the lack of
> > features in Gopher.
> 
> I'm sorry, this is a terribly ironic statement. Most of us are running
> Gopher to *avoid*:

But I need a way to address only a certain range of bytes in a file, to
get the size of the to be downloaded file and  to see if the file was
changed since I last got it. Of course Gopher has the advantage of a
defined directory index, but you can assume this in HTML (without Java-
script) too.

> simply because such features are weighty or unnecessary for the
> purpose of using a gopher server. It also detracts from the
> practicality of server software if you are, so to speak, unwilling to
> "eat your own dog food." If you won't run it, why would anyone else?

Noone is supposed to run the gopherd. It was written for Plan 9 so it
got some way to be integrated into the gopherspace  and because the
protocol is easy to implement. The port of that gopherd to Linux/BSD
was just a fun project. And the current feature change was done so I
can use the gopherfs for simple and fast to setup file transfer.

> For many people running a gopher server alone is unrealistic, and I
> don't offer all my services on gopher, but rather pick the ones that
> are appropriate for each.

That is too much effort in a pure standard Apache environment and it
opens another port. If you can do it over HTTP, why would you do it
over Gopher?

I am sorry, I am not a gopher enthusiast.

Sincerely,

Christoph Lohmann