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Gopher Redundant Server Type
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According to RFC 1436:
+ Item is a redundant server
The information applies to a duplicated server. The information
contained within is a duplicate of the primary server. The primary
server is defined as the last DirEntity that is has a non-plus
"Type" field. The client should use the transaction as defined by
the primary server Type field.
My interpretation is that the + entries are fallbacks for the
previous DirEntity type above it.
DirEntity in RFC 1436 is defined as:
DirEntity ::= Type User_Name Tab Selector Tab Host Tab Port CR-LF
As a fallback, it's unclear if the "User_Name" section of the
redundant (+) DirEntity should display in addition to the primary
DirEntity, or if only the primary should be shown and the
redundant entries used by the client as fallback in case of
a server error response. The UMN Gopher client seems to prefer
this later style, where only the primary DirEntity is visible to
the end user.
What follows is a test implementation of the + type that can be
referenced by gopher client developers in their testing:
Type 1 Test with 4 redundancies
gopher.blackType 0 Test with 2 redundancies
gopher application development