Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Redirect gnutelephony.org

[Thérèse Godefroy]

Hello Bob,

Thanks for trying to solve this issue.

Le 05/02/2018 06:52, Bob Proulx a écrit :
> Thérèse Godefroy wrote:
>> The old gnutelephony.org website, which went down in August 2015,
>> now points to savannah.nongnu.org (208.218.235.79),
> 
> That seems like a very confusing configuration.  Because then a user
> would find themselves on what looks like Savannah but by a different
> domain.

This is already happening. It's still better than ending up on
whatevername.org, as they did before. At least on the Savannah home page
they have a search box, and if they type "telephony" they get 2 relevant
projects: Bayonne and Gnucomm.

> And because of the domain difference it will use a cookie for
> the other domain instead of the Savannah one.

Will this happen if the URL is not redirected, but rewritten (as
suggested in my last message)? I assume the cookie will be for the
rewritten version (gnu.org/software/gnucomm/), not the original domain
(gnutelephony.org).

In fact, the only cookie I ever saw on gnu.org is the language cookie
which goes with the "set language" feature.

> Perhaps we should put in a redirect in that case so that if someone
> arrives at Savannah by an unexpected and undesired name that they get
> redirected to the main domain.

Isn't it what the default vhost does already? What really happens is
that if someone arrives at www.gnu.org by an unexpected name, they get
redirected to the Savannah home page. And if they arrive directly at
Savannah, they stay there.

> That would clean up this current
> situation.  I think that would make the best of the situation since we
> can't prevent the world from pointing to it.
> 
> I will make that change sometime this week when I get enough time to
> make the change and test it.

Thanks!

>> What we would like to do now is redirect all requests for
>> http(s)://gnutelephony.org/* or http(s)://www.gnutelephony.org/* to
>> http(s)://www.gnu.org/gnucomm/gnucomm.html
> 
> I think you mean this address:
> 
>   https://www.gnu.org/software/gnucomm/

Either one will do. gnucomm/index.html is "symlinked" (not exactly,
because this is done by mod_rewrite) to gnucomm/gnucomm.html.

[...]
> But I would want to be convinced.  Please say a few words in favor of
> why this feature needs to be created for the first time for this
> project?  And if so and if it is a desirable enough feature then I
> could see that we would want to make that possibility available to all
> other GNU projects as well.

See the whole story below.

> Note that it will require a test for this feature to be added to the
> test project as well.  If a test is not added then there is no
> guarentee that it will not be broken at some time in the future
> because it isn't otherwise documented.  After a few years (months?)
> everyone will have forgotten about the configuration

A vhost is rather easy to detect. You can add explanations in the
configuration file.

> and then it would
> be lost and broken.  I am trying to think of a good way to have a list
> of available redirects available for download such that the entire set
> could be automatically tested.  Because trying to keep the test
> framework updated would otherwise be problematic.  They would probably
> always lag behind and be out of date.
> 
> It also looks like email address @gnutelephony.org for the registered
> user dyfet must be broken because the mail would attempt to connect to
> Savannah which does not receive email.  That needs to be updated.

This address has been broken for 2 1/2 years. This is just one more
broken email address. Every time I try an address that I find around
gnu.org, I cross fingers, but very often it doesn't work.

> Bob

gnutelephony.org covers 7 GNU projects (bayonne, sipwitch commoncpp,
ccscript, ccaudio, ccrtp, and the GNU telephony subsystem, gnucomm).
They are all maintained by David Sugar. gnutelephony.org is more or less
equivalent to gnucomm, but with a wider scope. It became independent in
2005, and accumulated a lot of data until the server went down in 2015.
By then, there were plenty of links to it all over the web. As a quick
fix, David made gnutelephony.org point to another (unrelated) site that
he is involved with. But this made it look like gnutelephony.org had
been hijacked.

Last October, I tried to fix a few dead links which were reported by
linc, and found a big mess in the telephony pages. I also found the
Wayback Machine archive of gnutelephony.org. After discussing with
David, I imported as much data as possible to the relevant pages. Now
gnucomm is more or less equivalent to the gnutelephony main page. It
acts as an general index for the other telephony projects.

The next step was to point gnutelephony.org to one of the FSF servers
and redirect to https://www.gnu.org/software/gnucomm/ (strictly
equivalent to https://www.gnu.org/software/gnucomm/gnucomm.html).
We contacted address@hidden, and Ian said it was OK to use
208.118.235.148 (wildebeest). He also said he would set up the
redirection to the gnucomm home page.

After changing the A record of gnutelephony.org, we were surprised to
see that it didn't point to www.gnu.org, but to frontent0. This is
probably what the default vhost of wildebeest redirects to.

Since after several weeks and several emails the redirection to gnucomm
wasn't in effect, I had the idea of pointing gnutelephony.org to
frontent0 instead of wildebeest, so that the Savannah Hackers would be
in charge -- that's what you get for being helpful ;). Ineiev suggested
to create a vhost, and I tried to refine it by using a rewrite directive
instead of a redirection.

As you see, this is a very unusual case, and I don't think a similar
situation would arise with another GNU project.

FYI: I just tested rewriting a bogus domain to the gnucomm home page in
my local Apache setup, and it worked fine. The URL bar shows the gnucomm
address, not the original request. And there is no cookie.
Since the title of the gnucomm home page mentions GNU Telephony,
visitors know they are at the right place.

Best,
Thérèse