Re: [Bug-gnubg] Downloads from gnubg.org appear to be compressed twice

[Michael Petch]

On 08/02/2011 7:22 PM, motiv4u wrote:
> For Windows users: Winrar fails to de-decompress,
> but 7Zip (Open Source Freeware for Windows) does the job.
> (not a solution, just a patch on a wooden leg to work with present tarballs)
>
> N.

After knowing that there is double compression, I have discovered a few 
ways around this (Although I recommend a server side change to Apache 
and GnuBG to disable gzip for chunked encoding).

First, if you're using Internet Explorer, the only way it appears to get 
around this problem is to simply turn off HTTP/1.1 (This disabled 
chunked encoding, which in turn will turn off the extra layer of 
compression). To do this pull down the Tools menu, select "Internet 
options", click the "Advanced" tab then remove the check marks by "use 
HTTP 1.1 and use HTTP 1.1 through proxy connections". You will need to 
restart Internet Explorer. The on the fly gzip compression on the GNUBG 
web server can't do do so without HTTP 1.1 support on the client.

On Firefox there are a couple of methods. Both require entering this in 
the URL bar:

about:config

You will be asked if you really wish to do so. Once in the config page 
there are 2 methods. You can change network.http.version from 1.1 to 1.0 
or I prefer changing  network.http.accept-encoding and remove gzip from 
it (firefox defaults to 'gzip,deflate' change it to just 'deflate').

Winrar works BUT you have to coerce it. If you use normal Firefox/IE 
settings and download the double comrpessed file you can simply rename 
it so that the filename has an extra .gz on the end. Let's say you 
downloaded the file 
http://www.gnubg.org/media/sources/gnubg-source-SNAPSHOT-20110207.tar.gz 
. Save it as 
http://www.gnubg.org/media/sources/gnubg-source-SNAPSHOT-20110207.tar.gz.gz  
instead (note the extra .gz on the end). if you already have it saved 
just rename it and add an extra .gz on the end.

Regarding the GNUBG webserver, One may wish to look at disabling 
compression of files that are already compressed (ie .gz extensions). 
One can find info on doing that here:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_deflate.html

Specifically I think what we want can be done by doing something like 
changing the SetEnvIfNoCase if it read:

SetEnvIfNoCase REQUEST_URI .(?:gif|jp?g|png|zip|gz)$ no-gzip dont-vary