Problems

blogger not processing openID delegation

It was pleasant to discover that blogger.com (now part of the Google conglomerate) started supporting OpenID comment authentication last year.

However, at some point in the last couple of months it stopped working for me; I get the error code bX-m9h15s when trying to authenticate. As far as I know, my OpenID server is working just fine (OpenID Checkup agrees).

If I use my server URL directly (instead of an HTML resource that uses delegation) it works, albeit without incorporating any of the Simple Registration data. There are plenty of other reports, but nobody competent (and/or employed by google) has responded.

There doesn’t seem to be a true bug reporting facility for blogger; the competent users help the incompetent users on the discussion forum, but I can’t see any developer or even QC presence there.

Apache 304 and mod_deflate revisited

Last year I commented on how mod_deflate breaks the cache validation model. Essentially the problem has been addressing two issues:

Apache bug #39727, RFC 2616 requires unique strong entity tags for every entity. Presumably this means after Content-Encoding (but not Transfer-Encoding). The fix was for deflate to add “-gzip” to the ETag.
Apache bug #45023 concerns Apache not being able to recognise the transformed ETag (with the -gzip) as the same entity, and hence not sending 304s when it should have.

So in January 2008, a change was committed to fix #39727, which introduced #45023. Now in April this year, it was reversed to fix #45023. I agree with the priorities here; no caching is much worse for web performance.

As Roy Fielding pointed out the correct way to deal with this issue is to stop abusing Content-Encoding for performance-compression and start using Transfer-Encoding; pity browsers and HTTP servers haven’t got there yet.

Unclean macports gettext upgrade

An innocent port upgrade -uc outdated turned into macports breakage after it tried to deactivate gettext. The error messages, ad infinitum, are:

--->  Deactivating gettext @0.17_3
Error: Deactivating gettext 0.17_3 failed:
Error: Unable to upgrade port: dyld: Library not loaded:
/opt/local/lib/libintl.8.dylib
  Referenced from: /opt/local/bin/ln
  Reason: image not found
Error: Unable to exec port: dyld: Library not loaded:
/opt/local/lib/libintl.8.dylib
  Referenced from: /opt/local/bin/ln
  Reason: image not found

The reason is that I have the coreutils+with_default_names port installed, and those binaries link to the gettext libraries. The coreutils binaries are used by the macports activation scripts, and the macports coreutils are earlier on the PATH. Cue breakage.

The solution, as explained on macports-users, is:

Add a binpath to macports.conf that has the (presumably working) Apple coreutils in /usr/bin and /bin before the macports ones
port deactivate coreutils
port deactivate gettext
port activate gettext
port activate coreutils