Probably best to read this first:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2013000
This adds an effective-url=true|false flag to nbdkit-curl-plugin. If
true, the first time we fetch the URL, we fetch the "effective" URL
(ie. the URL after all redirects were resolved) and use that for all
future connections within the current nbdkit instance.
The idea behind this patch is to do with the Fedora mirror system
which is flakey. Some mirrors return errors or 404s. And the mirror
system will give you a new redirect each time (within your
geographical region). This results in transfers sometimes failing
because a single read went to a bad mirror.
After implementing this patch I'm not very happy with it. It is
incomplete because we pass the original URL to cookie-script and
header-script, so plugin/curl/scripts.c will also need to be modified.
Once those modifications are done the change becomes quite invasive.
Also I'm not convinced that it really solves any problem. In the
manual change I wrote:
Note use of this feature in long-lived nbdkit instances can cause
subtle problems:
• The effective URL persists across connections for the lifetime
of the nbdkit instance. If nbdkit is used for a long time then
it is possible for the redirected URL to become stale.
• It will defeat some mirror load-balancing techniques.
• If the mirror service sometimes redirects to a broken URL and
it happens that the URL you fetch first is broken then nbdkit
will no longer recover on subsequent connections (instead you
will need to restart nbdkit).
I suggested another way to solve this by using curl APIs to fetch the
effective URL up front and passing that URL to nbdkit (see
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2013000#c1), but
apparently that solution isn't acceptable for unclear reasons.
I can't think of any other way to solve this in the context of nbdkit
(maybe have it detect when redirection is happening and retry the
redirection on error?). So here's the patch.
Rich.