Re: [mv] Undefined catalog:

[Mike Heins <mikeh@minivend.com>]

******    message to minivend-users from Mike Heins <mikeh@minivend.com>     ******

Quoting cfm@maine.com (cfm@maine.com):
> If someone doesn't understand web server, permissions, paths and so
> on and their installation fails, it's not a minivend bug.  Rather,
> if it succeeds under those conditions it is instead a minivend MIRACLE.

Thank you for the vote of confidence on the install. I sometimes too
think it is a miracle that so many people are able to install Minivend.
You should have gone through the V1.03 installation -- come to think of
it, Christopher, you probably did. 8-) You have been using this stuff since
Vend, right? That would make almost 5 years now.

> 
> We recently ran into an (issue|bug) with minivend, Roxen and tlink. tlink
> was passing args to minivend running on a WN server, but the arguments
> had been "pre-decoded" by Roxen.  Roxen and WN did not quite agree on
> what to do with space/+/%20.  A process with "Browse Catalog" that worked on
> either machine did not work over network via tlink.
> 
> I don't know if that is a bug in minivend, WN, Roxen or tlink.  My bet
> is that it is a conceptual flaw in tlink, but one that will only bite
> the millions of systems mixing Roxen and WN servers.  ;^)

You can blame the HTTP, CGI, and HTML specs there. If there is a + but 
no & in a QUERY_STRING, that is supposed to be the value of keywords,
and the CGI protocol uses those to set the value of @ARGV. It isn't
often used these days, but remember the <ISINDEX> tag? That is what used
it. It still sits there in the spec, and if nothing else, Minivend tries
to follow the CGI spec. 8-) I guess some pieces of software have decided
that ISINDEX and keywords are useless these days. They are probably right,
but they aren't following the spec.

MV also actually did something with those arguments in some cases,
though I don't think anyone but me has ever used it. Basically,
if you twiddle the source a bit (it used to be commented in MV3.x)
you can/could say:

        vlink simple scan se=renaissance

and get back a tab-delimited set of results. There were other things you
could do to pass input. Or you could pass it a page on the standard input
and get the output back. Not very useful any more, but before MiniMate
there was a time when I used that in some maintenance scripts.

> 
> That being said, some sort of a minivend-bug.pl script like that used
> for mysql or emacs would probably be a good idea.  It would describe
> system, users, permissions, installation, and how the user can duplicate 
> the problem or it is not a bug.  Perhaps a separate mailing list, rather
> than a web page would be less work?
> 

That is a good idea -- I tried that once with a "report_problem" script,
but so rarely did I get enlightening information about the problem that
I gave up on it. (Long time mail list members may remember seeing its
output sent to the list.) Perhaps I can resurrect it.

-- 
Internet Robotics, 131 Willow Lane, Floor 2, Oxford, OH  45056
phone +1.513.523.7621 fax 7501 <mikeh@minivend.com>

I have a cop friend who thinks he ought be able to give a new ticket;
"too dumb for conditions".

-- 
Internet Robotics, 131 Willow Lane, Floor 2, Oxford, OH  45056
phone +1.513.523.7621 fax 7501 <mikeh@minivend.com>

I have a cop friend who thinks he ought be able to give a new ticket;
"too dumb for conditions".
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