On 11/12/25 8:07 AM, Dora Scilipoti wrote:
I'm sorry, I have an update; I just realized...On 10/29/25 13:53, Corwin Brust wrote:Would it be possible for you to use another tool to create the diffs, perhaps from your own "local" machine rather than having it run on theserver?While it is true that a webmaster can use cvs diff instead of the web interface of the CVS repo, asking ordinary readers to go through that trouble just to check a piece of information is at least unfair. In
A while ago I casually suggested that we should retire viewvc altogether. Viewvc was stuck in Python 2 for years and it was one of the reasons why vcs1 could not be upgraded (it will break after the upgrade). This would've been a very bad news for the webmaster team. But fortunately viewvc very recently had a new beta release that runs with Python 3, which means it can/may be introduced into Debian unstable again (and trickles down to Trisquel in 3~5 years). This won't solve the DDoS and bots situations but at least we can see an upgrade path for vcs1. Newer software means newer tools to strengthen our defense.
So, I was gently letting you know that it'd be very difficult to re-enable diff in viewvc for the foreseeable future, unless we don't care about downtime on vcs1.
As the "asking readers to use cvs the command line tool is unfair" part, I agree, but it's also very unfair that FSF hosted servers receive DDoS attacks in the scale of millions of unique IP addresses, and it's also unfair to all cvs users that vcs1 suffers from downtime because of what I mentioned above.
fact, the most important page in www.gnu.org, free-sw.html, has links to the diffs under the 'History' heading. For example:<li><a href="//web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/www/philosophy/free- sw.html?root=www&r1=1.168&r2=1.169">Version 1.169</a>: Explain more clearly why the four freedoms must apply to commercial activity.Explain why the four freedoms imply the freedom not to runthe program and the freedom to delete it, so there is no need to state those as separate requirements.</li>
We should really get rid of these links...it's one of the reasons why bots have been hitting viewvc so hard.
Cheers, -- Luke Yasuda About me: https://jing.rocks/about/ GPG Fingerprint: 4E09 8D19 00AA 3F72 1899 2614 09B3 316E 13A1 1EFC
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