[BUG] fetch documentation menu choices don't work

Mon Feb 5 23:41:57 UTC 2001

Since we're making a new version, can I suggest that either:

(a) The "fetch documentation" menu operations be fixed (this includes FileURL 
fixes, as well as properly dealing with 404 Not Found responses from 
websites), or

(b) "fetch documentation" be removed from the various menus that it lives on.

I fixed the FileURL problems that were breaking it initially, but then ran 
into a complete lack of detection of status codes in the code for
httpGetNoError:args:accept:
which ignores the status from the HTTPSocket, and tries to parse the 
resultant text from the web server to find 404 errors. Unfortunately, it 
tries to do an exact string match on the resultant HTML, which will almost 
never work (the code won't even handle a <!DOCTYPE header, and requires a 
linefeed between the <HEAD> and <TITLE> tags!).

I've enclosed my fixes for FileURL's, but don't really want to get into the 
many problems with the httpGet* family of routines, none of which seem to do 
robust error checking.

Their interface leaves something to be desired, as well: you can't get any of 
the HTTP headers, and they return either a Stream (if OK), or a String of 
some sort (if an error). Not terribly object oriented. So the code that uses 
them has to do class testing to use the result values.

Even if it worked, the documentation that it tries to get is woefully out of 
date and incomplete (there's about 10 files there, if I remember correctly).

-- 
Ned Konz
currently: Stanwood, WA
email:     ned at bike-nomad.com
homepage:  http://bike-nomad.com
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