Subject: Re: Cloning from sites with 404 overridden

From: Andreas Ericsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 14:36:32 +0100

[email-masked] wrote:
> If someone feels ambitious, you can detect this condition automatically
> by searching for a file that you know won't be there and seeing if you
> get a 404 response to that.
> 
> To avoid punishing good servers, it would be nice to defer the test
> until reciving the first corrupted object.
> 
> I'm not sure what the best "object that's not supposed to be there" is.

.git/objects/00/hoping-for-a-404-or-webadmin-should-fix

It has the right number of chars so it should fit in wherever a real 
object name does but is obviously bogus anyways.

> It could just be a random hash, or would a malformed object file name
> be better?

A malformed object name is infinitely better. Otherwise we'd end up with 
a wild guess that hits home some day, to much surprise and a bug-report 
I wouldn't want to track. Not to mention the embarrassment when 
explaining why that object-name was chosen.

> 
> (As an aside, I suspect this is all caused by Microsoft's "friendly HTML
> error messages" invention.)

The body of the 404-page has absolutely nothing to do with it.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   [email-masked]
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231