webserver requirements (was: PR 25 and PR 68)

[Lorenzo Cappelletti]

On Sun May 25 at 22:47 +0200, Werner Koch wrote:

> My proposal is to switch to another webserver.  I use Boa for quite
> some time and after some recent fixes it is really stable and works

As long as the server does what we expect it to do, any webserver is 
fine for me, including Boa.

Anyway, I want to highlight the fact that the most widely spread 
webserver out there is Apache and we should support it, seeing that 
we're going to have lots of official mirrors.

I know very very little about Apache, but I can install it on my local 
PC and play with it a while.  If no expert volunteer steps forward...

>  1. We need only html files but have no need for other file types for
>     now.  It won't be hard to add other types, though.

What do you mean with "other types"?  I remind you users can download 
tarballs from the site.

>  2. When asked for foo.ll.html the server should return foo.ll.html or
>     in case this does not exists foo.html .

If it returned foo.en.html, it'd be much better for caching issue.

>  3. When asked for foo.html the server should look at the the
>     Accept-Language header and return foo.ll.html with a best matching
>     ll .  If it is not found foo.html is served.

Again, better if foo.en.html

> - so we should make sure that we always link to the correct language
> file (<a href="foo.es.html">) with the minor problem that a reference

Pages are generated so that references point to the same language 
version.

When a user enters the site, it gets the best matching page.  From then 
on, they can choose their preferrend language from the menu on the top 
and stick to that choice as long as they want.  The Accept-Language 
mechanism is no longer triggered.

> Before you ask: The full content negotation burns a lot of CPU due to
> frequent system calls - something I would really like to avoid.

When is content negotiation triggered?  If it is when a user enters the 
site only, it isn't a real problem.  If it is even when a foo.xx.html 
page is requested, well, we can't do much for it, sorry.

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