Re: [TCLCORE] My script can no longer download tarballs from the core server

[Schelte B. <tc...@tc...>]

On 05/10/2025 19:18, Andreas Kupries wrote:
> I believe it would be best to talk with Richard, as the person
> managing the repos and the fossil serving them. There might be some
> way of bypassing the defenses.
> 
> Some discussion athttps://fossil-scm.org/forum/forumpost/6c9c86ef97
> 
That is very interesting. Thanks for pointing me to that discussion. I 
had assumed that this robot defense mechanism was implemented by 
cloudflare and therefor I expected it to be the same for all core 
repositories.

Now that I understand it is a fossil feature, I looked around and found 
the fossil robot defense settings page. I subsequently found that that 
setting is slightly different on different repositories. I initially ran 
into the problem with the tcltls repository. This has robot-restrict set to:
	timelineX,diff,annotate,zip,fileage,file,finfo,reports

The tcl repository on the other hand actually allows downloading a 
tarball with wget. It has this in the robot-restrict property:
	timeline,*diff,vpatch,annotate,blame,praise,dir,tree

I suspected the absence of zip here is what allows the tarball download. 
When I removed that tag from the setting in the tcltls repository I was 
indeed able to download a tarball with wget again.

Please let me know if anybody considers this an unacceptable risk. Then 
I will restore the original setting and possibly add some pattern to the 
robot-exception property. Otherwise I would like to keep it this way.


Thanks,
Schelte.