[plt-scheme] Planet vs firewalls

On Jan 20, 2005, at 9:50 AM, Jacob Matthews wrote:

>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>  http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
>
> Eli Barzilay wrote:
>
>> But the best solution IMO is close to your last sentence -- it's using
>> HTTP as the universal communication protocol -- simply transfer the
>> content through a web server.  Operating systems, sysadmins, ISP, etc
>> -- all will start helping you instead of complaining about the hole in
>> the wall.  (=> for other ports, the default is becoming to be more
>> restrictive, and for 80+HTTP you get forwarding hosts, caches, etc
>> etc.)
>>
> I actually don't have any problem with using HTTP as a protocol for 
> requesting and retrieving packages -- that's what it's for, even if 
> applications tend to use only a narrow subset of its features. The 
> only reason I didn't use HTTP from the outset is that I wanted there 
> to be a negotiation phase of the protocol, where recursive 
> dependencies were resolved in-protocol before anything was downloaded. 
> I haven't implemented that yet, though, and looking back on how people 
> have used PLaneT so far that decision now seems like overkill.
>
> When I have time I'll rewrite the server to serve packages as a 
> servlet, and let recursive dependencies get handled either with some 
> helper servlet that answers recursive-dependency queries, or with the 
> current system where requires just get satisfied independently as the 
> compiler encounters them.

Couldn't you also encode the current protocol as an HTTP exchange?  
Since you have control over both the client and the server, you could 
say that the client sends an initial request, and the response would be 
an html thing that encoded the information that the server needed from 
the client.  Et Cetera.

john

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