Forum Post Attachment Trailing Garbage

[asnelt]

We use a package release forum in the Octave Forge project at https://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/octave/viewforum.php?f=1
When attaching a file to a post the files after upload are not identical to the files before upload. The file size increases. When decompressing a tarball you will get a warning
'gzip: stdin: decompression OK, trailing garbage ignored'.

This bug occured on different platforms (Debian, MacOS) and browsers (Firefox, Iceweasel).

[ctsai]

Hello,

Thank you for this report, could you attach the original file to this ticket as well so that we can do further testing on this?

Thanks,
Chris Tsai, SourceForge.net Support

[asnelt]

The original file before upload.

[asnelt]

The file after upload containing trailing garbage.

[asnelt]

In this ticket there seems to be the same bug present as in the forum. The file "file_before_upload.tar.gz" also contains trailing garbage after attaching it to this ticket.

[ctsai]

Okay, in that case, can you upload it to your, or your project's home directory via SFTP so that we can take a look at this?

Let me know once you've done that and please provide the path to the file you uploaded.

Thanks,
Chris Tsai, SourceForge.net Support

[asnelt]

Please find the file before upload at
http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~aonken/file_before_upload.tar.gz
and the file after upload at
http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~aonken/file_after_upload.tar.gz

Thanks,
Arno

[ctsai]

Hello,

Thank you for the update, I'm escalating this to our operations team to investigate this further.

Regards,
Chris Tsai, SourceForge.net Support

[ceverest]

Greetings,

I wouldn't worry too much about this error. It's just a symptom of using http to transfer files around. See http://www.gzip.org/#faq8 for more info.

Additionally, you should be using the FRS service - Release files for download. This is the preferred way to release files rather than the phpBB forums. In addition FRS can be used with Rsync, SCP or SFTP. All of which should be more reliable and will be distributed across our mirror network.

You could then link to the releases from your phpBB forum.

Cheers,

Chris Everest
Systems Programmer/Analyst
SourceForge.net Support

[hauberg]

Hi

I am one of the administrators of the Octave-Forge project (octave.sf.net) and I think we need to add a bit more information here.

Octave-Forge is a collection of 'packages' for GNU Octave (www.octave.org). Each package is a tar.gz file containing scripts and functions that can be installed in Octave by the user. Each package has a separate maintainer. As we have quite a lot of packages in Octave-Forge we also have quite a lot of maintainers. We also serve as an entry point to new Octave contributors and as such try to get new contributors as much responsibility as possible. Thus, we do our best to make new people package maintainers.

We release the packages to the users via the FRS service. For security reasons we, however, choose not to give all package maintainers the access to upload files via FRS. Instead, we ask package maintainers to upload releases to the phpBB forum. A few trusted administrators (mostly Carlo de Falco and myself) then monitors this forum. When a new package is uploaded to the forum, we then upload it to the FRS system. We simply chose the forum as we needed some place where people could upload files without being project administrators.

So, the suggested solutions are not really applicable to our problem as they seem to require that we give all package maintainers access to meddling with the FRS. This would be a poor decision from a security point of view. Also, if somebody did something wrong without noticing it would be very hard to figure out what happened is many people would have to be involved.

Thanks
Søren

[nhruby]

Hi,

Thanks for this extra explanation of your workflow and how this particular problem affects your operations. As a result I'm reopening this ticket and will investigate the gzip issue.

Depending of what the problem is we may not have the ability to provide a very quick fix. Even if we could, there are currently some infrastructure limitations internal to our phpBB deployment that would make your described workflow surrounding the phpBB Hosted App more fragile than I think you would like.

I'll continue to investigate this error and look around to see if there's a more reliable alternative for your described workflow.

Thanks,

nathan hruby
System Programmer/Analyst
SourceForge.net

[ctsai]

Greetings,

We've announced today that we will be retiring the Hosted Apps platform. There are many reasons for this, but in the end, it comes down to the fact that we haven't had, nor will we have the resources to maintain this platform (as evidenced by how long this bug, among with many others, have been unaddressed). As we are retiring this service, I'm going to have to close this as "wontfix".

As stated in the blog post, we are writing documentation on how to migrate your data off the platform, and we want to make sure you have proper data dumps. If any of you are having issues with the backup utility, or with the migration instructions (once they're available), please log a new ticket on that. We want to help.

Regards,
Chris Tsai, SourceForge.net Support