Magnet links are erroneously escaped

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Issue migrated (2015-06-05) from old issue tracker http://mirrorbrain.org/issues/issue51

Title    Magnet links are erroneously escaped
 Priority   bug         Status     chatting
Superseder            Nosy List    poeml
Assigned To poeml      Keywords    torrents

msg175 (view) Author: poeml Date: 2010-03-31.20:16:36

Magnet links should be (XML-) escaped only when included inside Metalinks - but not when they are accessed directly, as became possible recently.

Thanks for Harold Feit for spotting this bug and pointing it out!

Wrong example: http://download.services.openoffice.org/files/stable/3.2.0/OOo- SDK_3.2.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_rpm.sh.magnet

magnet:? xt=urn:btih:5f8408693e57efacb05a4be61bea800f178c899a&xt=urn:md5:25ed776dac24 b7712b0a74343fb2f8f5&xl=9791103&dn=OOo-SDK_3.2.0_LinuxIntel_install_en- US_rpm.sh&as=http://download.services.openoffice.org/files/stable/3.2.0/OOo- SDK_3.2.0_LinuxIntel_install_en- US_rpm.sh&tr=http://torrent.projects.ooodev.org:6969/announce&tr=http:// borft.student.utwente.nl:6969/announce&tr=http://core-tracker.enlist-a- distro.net:9800/announce&tr=http://core- tracker.depthstrike.com:9800/announce&tr=http://clients-tracker.enlist-a- distro.net:9800/announce&tr=http://clients- tracker.depthstrike.com:9800/announce

msg181 (view) Author: poeml Date: 2010-04-23.03:01:37

Pondering if this bug should actually be there. If delivering magnet links in a plaintext HTTP response is useless, then it is void.

On the other hand, I now seem to remember why I did that: I wanted to give the user the magnet link for copy&paste, without spoiling the mirror list with that long, ugly thing... I think I read some documentation about magnet links claiming that an advantage of them over torrents would be that they can be copied & pasted. But presumably users will prefer to click on them, usually.

So we should rather link the ugly thing, and just give it a nice and simple name. "Magnet link". :)

So the only question is whether to keep the .magnet representation. If we keep it (why not) then it needs to be unescaped of course.

History
         Date         User  Action        Args
2010-09-19 01:05:32 poeml set    keyword: + torrents
2010-04-23 03:01:37 poeml set    messages: + msg181
2010-03-31 20:16:36 poeml create

poeml / mirrorbrain