[Mailman-Users] Question About Gzip'd Archives

[Mark Sapiro]

Grant Taylor wrote:

>On 09/03/09 15:45, Barry Finkel wrote:
>> I save it on my desktop, and when I look at the file, I see that it 
>> is a plain text file.  It is not a gzip'd file.  Why?  Thanks.
>
>I'm betting that Apache is automatically decompressing the file and 
>sending it to you.


I agree.


>Apache (and a few other web servers) know how to serve up content that 
>has been compressed on disk to save space.  It can be configured to send 
>either the compressed or decompressed content.
>
>The thing that I'm not sure about is how Apache will behave (if it's 
>working with compression) if it has two files, 2009-August.txt and 
>2009-August.txt.gz.


The same as it behaves if you ask for 2009-August.txt.gz and there is
no file named 2009-August.txt. You ask for 2009-August.txt.gz and
assuming it finds it, it serves it according to how it's configured to
serve that file. It won't be aware of any similarly named file without
the .gz extension.


>Another thing that may be messing with you is that Firefox may be 
>reporting (via HTTP header) that it can accept and deal with compressed 
>content and IE not doing so.


Or vice versa?

This is not likely to be the full explanation because the OP reported
that IE saved the file and the content was uncompressed text.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan