mod_put, hacked

In a fit of silliness, I hacked mod_put to work with Netscape's impression of what a HTTP MOVE command should do. This coupled with mod_put's existing PUT and DELETE methods is sufficient to allow you to use Netscape 4.5's Roaming Profiles with Apache.

The tarball should be untarred in your apache directory (yes, I built in the directory tree). Add the following to your ./configure line: --add-module=src/modules/extra/mod_put.c

Build as normal. See the documentation for the original mod_put to find out how to use the damn thing.

Note that Netscape's MOVE is not quite compliant with what W3C were proposing; however, since MOVE doesn't seem to appear anywhere obvious (try searching the W3C website for MOVE, it's about the 9th hit on the results page) I'm not overly worried by this.

Here's how I told the guys on geeksrv about this:

From: Waider
To: geeksrv
Subject: fun fun fun
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 16:23:50 +0000 (GMT)

So, I was thinking it'd be nice if I could use Netscape's roaming
profiles feature particularly since I tend to have eleventy-seven
copies of my bookmarks file on the go at any given time. And so I
plugged netscape into apache and said, right, go to it. And that,
as you can guess, didn't work. So I added in mod_put, a module of
simple construction (read: security hazard) that allows Apache to
do PUT and DELETE requests, and said to Netscape, right, go to it
/now/, and I guess you can see a trend here, because goddammit it
didn't work AGAIN, and eventually I found it wanted to do MOVE as
well as PUT and DELETE, so I got out my hacking helmet and gloves
and read doco and code and did a bit of experimenting and after a
brief period of swearing at the Apache guys for what they've left
out of their API I finally had it doing roughly what I needed. So
I said to Netscape, right, go to it now, and fuck me but the damn
thing went right ahead and /did/ it and I figured, hey, maybe you
could all use a piece of this, so I put it in a tar file and it's
at http://www.infolive.ie/~waider/hacks/ and you know, I'm really
too damned lazy to document any of the workings so you'll have to
dig up the doco for the original mod_put and work off that if you
feel this stuff is of use. And if not, well, what the hey. It's a
free country and all, if you don't think about it much... Waider.