[Catalyst] Handling arguments with Reges vs the meaning of paths

[A. Pagaltzis]

Hi Bill,

* Bill Moseley <moseley at hank.org> [2006-01-06 20:05]:
>In the context of CGI the path segments after the script are
>placed in PATH_INFO.  In the context of Catalyst, the script is
>the "action" and the PATH_INFO becomes the arguments.

Those are server-side processing minutiae. They have nothing to
do with how a client sees things.

>Spider's don't make up URLs to follow, they follow links.  So
>that's only going to happen if you are putting up invalid links.

*insert bob-the-angry-flower on apostrophes* :-)

Anyway, no, they don’t make up URLs, but people do, and people
sometimes post links. Or maybe your code has a bug, and /foo/1
links not to /bar/2, but to /foo/1/bar/2. Or has a self-link on
/foo/1 that points to /foo/1/1. Or you restructure your site, and
outdated links from other sites now return something that has
nothing to do with where the link used to point to, but with a
status 200 rather than either 410 or (as they should) a redirect.
Or the site is a wiki and contains lots of not-yet-live internal
links.

They aren’t very common cases, but they happen, and they should
not return 200.

>Then what should a request for an invalid article do?
>
>    $ HEAD http://plasmasturm.org/log/3583329393/
>    200 OK

Yes, I know; it’s a bug, and it annoys me greatly. The reason is
that the log permalink pages are served dynamically, because I
haven’t figured out a good way to build them statically. I use
make to build the site, and it’s a bit hard to coerce into doing
what I need, because there’s no 1:1 correspondence between source
and target files.

I’ve been looking at other build systems, but so far I haven’t
found anything as no-fuss as make yet. S/Cons: too specialised.
The CPAN has nothing viable. Maybe Rake is an option.

There are also a number of other warts; I’d like to set the mtime
on my newsfeed according to the updated-time of the newest entry,
f.ex.

Maybe I should just write a script to build the site in Perl…

Anyway, this is way off-topic. Just to say that just because the
site has bugs doesn’t mean I don’t care.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>