[Rd] Non-webby links on Windows web page

[Winston Chang]

I agree that it would be nice to have mirrors configured the same.
Several weeks ago, there was a change to the .htaccess file at the top
level of the CRAN repository which brought down RStudio mirror, since
the .htaccess file used an Apache module that wasn't installed on the
RStudio mirror.

A really nice way to do this would be to have an official CRAN mirror
Docker image with the proper Linux distro + Apache configuration. Then
to set up a mirror, all you'd need to do is to set up rsyncing of the
contents of the central CRAN repo, and then do `docker pull` and then
`docker run` (with a few more command line arguments). Even the rsync
could be done within a docker container, so you'd run two containers
that share a volume: one container for syncing, and one container for
the web server.

-Winston

On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 2:20 PM, Boylan, Ross <Ross.Boylan at ucsf.edu> wrote:
> Thanks for the detective work.  I'm a little surprised all the mirrors aren't configured the same.
>
> Maybe it should be a little easier to figure out how to contact the maintainers of a particular site.
>
> At the bottom of the front page are links to 2 organization; picking the most specific led to a general welcome page.  It had a contact llink at the bottom, which led to a page that had an IT contact on it, cnrit at berkeley.edu. I'll try sending it there with a cc to cran at r-project.org, which I found chasing another set of links.
>
> Ross
> ________________________________________
> From: Jeroen Ooms [jeroenooms at gmail.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2014 8:58 PM
> To: Boylan, Ross
> Cc: r-devel at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Rd] Non-webby links on Windows web page
>
> This caused by the Berkeley web server setting strange content-types.
> It is probably more suitable to report this to the Berkeley mirror
> admin or cran maintainers.
>
>> library(httr)
>> GET("http://cran.cnr.berkeley.edu/bin/windows/base/README.R-3.1.2")$headers["content-type"]
> $`content-type`
> [1] "application/x-troff-man"
>
>> GET("http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/README.R-3.1.2")$headers["content-type"]
> $`content-type`
> [1] "text/plain"
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 7:05 PM, Boylan, Ross <Ross.Boylan at ucsf.edu> wrote:
>> On the Windows download page the second link is "Installation and other instructions" http://cran.cnr.berkeley.edu/bin/windows/base/README.R-3.1.2.  Clicking on this gets me a "download or open as" dialogue rather than a page of text.
>>
>> I think something like this happened a few years ago, and the problem was the MIME type of the link.
>>
>> It would be nice to fix.
>>
>> Thanks.
>> Ross Boylan
>>
>> P.S. I was using http://cran.cnr.berkeley.edu/ and FF 33.1 on Win 7.
>>
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>
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