download troubles

If you use the distro machine, or indeed develop with PHP, then this matters. If you've had any problems downloading files from corz.org, this will explain why.

I thought I was clever, well, I mean, I am, but I thought my wee line of code was clever. inside the distro machine, at the point where it catches and sends the download to the user, it switches off zlib compression. I figured this might interfere with the download process.

For those that don't know, zlib compression compresses everything the server sends to the browser. all browsers understand this and decompress the page at the other end. the page you are reading now was sent across the wire as a gzip file.

But I was still getting erratic downloads. Sometimes they would be fine, the next, not. very weird. Tonight, as I tested the newly uploaded, slightly improved textview.php script, and its corresponding zip archive, it reached a new level of wonkiness, it plain wouldn't work.

the download was okay, it happened, but the resultant file was a mess, and wouldn't decompress nomatter which browser I grabbed it with or which decompressor I used. hmmm.

Then, for some reason, I decided to disable zlib compression in my .htaccess for the machine's folder..
simple .htaccess directive:
php_value zlib.output_compression Off
and TADA!

this has serious implications. either that or my web host has something weird going on in their server configs. I noted previously, with interest, that it was possible to enable zlib compression AND a zlib output handler simultaneously, a thing usually guaranteed to bring your website to a halt. it didn't, strangely. I left it like that for a couple of weeks even, just to see what would happen; nothing.

In short, at last, your server may simply ignore the setting inside the script smiley for :aargh: In this case, I recommend you add a line to the .htaccess file for that folder, which I have thoughtfully done for the distribution.

All ßeta testers, please upgrade to 0.7b3 a.s.a.p.

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

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