The following reply was made to PR general/2651; it has been noted by GNATS.
From: "Ralf S. Engelschall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: general/2651: Feature Request: Allow content-negotiation through
on-the-fly Actions
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1998 13:38:29 +0200
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> you wrote:
>[...]
>>Synopsis: Feature Request: Allow content-negotiation through
>>on-the-fly Actions
>[...]
>>Description:
> I would like to provide on-the-fly compression and tar files through Apache.
> e.g. a request for release.tar.gz compresses release.tar
> Currently if the file does not exist, the custom Action is not called. The
> compression can be done through the ErrorDocument, but the error code is sent
> already and this solution seems inelegant to me.
>>How-To-Repeat:
>>Fix:
> Add a new directive: Generate: <mime-type> <script> which will call the
> script.
> The script can either send an existing file or provide some sort of
> automatic
> generation. In addition to the obvious compression and archiving ability,
> simple
> content-negotiation could be used.
IMHO its not really necessary to create another directive because this
functionality already can be achieved by existing methods. One is to use a
RewriteRule to map certain extensions on URLs to your on-the-fly filters. For
instance when you have written a /path/to/bin/filter-gzip.cgi which reads the
file via PATH_TRANSLATED and outputs an "octet-stream"-declared gzip'ed
version of it, you simply can activate it for (perhaps) tar.gz and ps.gz files
as following:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/(.+\.(tar|ps))\.gz$ \
/path/to/bin/filter-gzip.cgi/$1 \
[T=application/x-httpd-cgi]
This rule should do the trick for you, even I've not tried it out myself.
Greetings,
Ralf S. Engelschall
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.engelschall.com
