A bit OT, I'm glossing Mark Sapiro's explanation of compressed file
handling in Mailman archive downloads.
Mark Dale via Mailman-Users writes:
> Thank you Mark, that information is appreciated and I've made the change.
I'm glad you find it useful. Note that the story is a little more
subtle than Mark Sapiro makes it here:
> > However, the point of this post is to point out that the .txt.gz files
> > are an anachronism from the days when the bit of bandwidth saved by
> > delivering a compressed version was important to more that a few ancient
> > curmudgeons like me.
> >
> > These days, the bandwidth savings is unimportant and is probably offset
> > by the redundant storage and processing for the .txt.gz files.
In fact, most modern systems will negotiate compressed streams, so if
you provide a .txt to your webserver, the client will tell the server
"hey, I know how to gunzip", the server will automatically gzip, the
client gunzip, and you know nothing about it except that you have text
onscreen.
It's unclear what the system will do if offered a .txt.gz file. If
the server is smart, it might say
Content-Type: text/plain; name=whatever.txt <-- note: no .gz
Content-Transfer-Encoding: gzip
and the end result is as above. But it's not obviously a good idea
for the server to second-guess the admin that way.
It's plausible that if the server just sends it as a binary, the
client will say, "oh, they gzipped it on purpose, I should treat it as
a file and save it", or it might say, "I know what a .txt is, and go
ahead and transparently ungzip it. Clients are reliably unreliable as
a class -- some users want Do What I Mean, some what Do What I Say,
and different clients will cater to different users.
Bottom line: if you're sure you want your .txt files treated as plain
text and displayed as conveniently as possible, ungzip them! Very
likely you won't use any more bandwidth (and by the way, modern
servers tend to cache that gzipped blob in case somebody asks for it
again, so on-the-fly compression doesn't necessarily waste hours of
CPU).
If for some reason you'd prefer that they be gzipped at both ends,
that's probably more work to guarantee.
Steve
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