ABCL User Question about following HTTP redirects for CL:OPEN on EXT:PATHNAME-URL references?

[Mark Evenson]

Alan Ruttenberg from <http://abcl.org/trac/ticket/432>:

So if you want to do something like use uiop/stream:copy-file which does
something like open the source, open the dest, read/write, it will not
do what you might expect. I don't see a way of controlling this
behavior. Arguably the default ought to be to follow redirects and open
the redirected-to file.

I replied:

ABCL-BUILD now uses uiop/steam:copy-file for the machinery which
retreives XDG rooted Ant and Maven installations from well-known URIs
c.f.
<http://abcl.org/trac/browser/trunk/abcl/contrib/abcl-build/build/install.lisp#L49>,
so the underlying ext:pathname-url implementation on
java.net.HTTPUrlConnection seems to be working for cases in which the
URI is already canonical in the form that would be idempotent for
following across HTTP 3xx redirects.

WORKAROUND: The current usage expected of the user is to introspect any
reference to a ext:pathname-url via CL:TRUENAME. If there is an
underlying redirect, CL:TRUENAME should somehow offer an API to the user
to customize its behavior. I am currently against "jumping" across URI
schema changes without a chance for user intervention. Smells like
another restart to me.

What would the current users of Armed Bear to do:

automatically follow all HTTP retrieval redirects without regards to
security concerns,

or

follow the current policy of doing "whatever ORCL thinks is right for
java.net.HTTPUrlConnection"?


-- 
"No, this is not a disentanglement, but a progressive /knotting-into/."