Thank you Douglas, That change solved my primary concern, the .pl files can now be viewed and saved.
Now, the server treating them as text on one hand is fine because they actually are text.
(On a tangent, the convention of a web server automatically executing files it finds in web dirs is a dangerous default and web servers should never execute anything except when whitelisted.)
However, I believe it can be worthwhile to take an extra step and force it to be a "download". This makes the behavior consistent with the tarballs which conceptually they are an alternative for.
I was going to say that a primary benefit of "download" is that the file keeps the original file datestamp on my computer when saved rather than being changed to "now" if one were to click it and then choose "Save As".
However, I found that an easy workaround is to right-click on the link and choose "Download Linked File" etc from the contextual menu, and then in that case the original datestamp is preserved.
Considering that, I would be fine either way, and in fact leaving things as they are now may be more beneficial to people that just want to quickly browse the source as if it were a README.
Thanks again. -- Darren Duncan On 2016-08-06 5:51 PM, Douglas Bell wrote:
Alright, this seems to be fixed. Thanks for letting us know: That error meant that it was still trying to execute it as CGI (though there were 2 permission failures that were preventing it). Now both the backpan and cpan mirrors on cpantesters do not even know what CGI is, so you can download those scripts. Apache thinks they're text, and I'm not presently concerned about arguing with it, but I could force it to be a real "download" if anyone thinks that's better.On Aug 6, 2016, at 6:21 AM, David Golden <x...@xdg.me> wrote: Doug, can you please take a look? David On Aug 6, 2016 5:07 AM, "Darren Duncan" <dar...@darrenduncan.net> wrote: For context, please see this BackPAN user directory: http://backpan.cpantesters.org/authors/id/G/GL/GLEACH/ BackPAN has permissions problems such that if one tries to download files named *.pl, such as the handful at the end of the above file listing, a 403 error results, eg "You don't have permission to access /authors/id/G/GL/GLEACH/pod2indexed_html-0.1.pl on this server." The expected result would be a 200 response with type text/plain that shows the source code of that file, same as when clicking on a *.meta or a *.readme file. In this case, the underlying problem is that there is a Perl script that was distributed bare a decade ago and not in a tarball, so a part of CPAN history so done can't be viewed easily without the fix. As the front page for BackPAN says it is run by the PAUSE admins and doesn't give other contact info, I'm writing modules@ to get the attention of whomever is best to deal with this problem. Thank you in advance for fixing this. -- Darren Duncan
