re Subject: Solution for windows users

[David Woodhouse]

On Sun, 2011-01-09 at 11:41 +0000, Kevin Reilly wrote:
> On 09/01/2011 00:28, David Woodhouse wrote:
> 
> > Yes. It's a crappy workaround for a bug in rtmpdump. Just fix rtmpdump
> > instead.
> 
> Ah, but we Windows users care not for such distinctions. We just keep
> piling on the crappy workarounds until it does what we want. We learned
> that from Microsoft ;)

You jest, but there is a real mindset issue here. I have friends who
make a *living* from piling workarounds on top of workarounds because
they're using software that they can't just fix.

But we *can* fix rtmpdump, so we *should* fix it rather than just
working around its bugs. It should work *every* time, not break for a
day and then 'magically' start working again because the cache expired.

You might be right that Windows users will tolerate that kind of
behaviour, because they don't know any better. But *I* won't.

Just make rtmpdump do the fetch every time, using If-Modified-Since: so
that it doesn't *actually* refetch the file if it hasn't changed.

(I don't think the BBC server does ETag, so If-None-Match: won't work).

-- 
dwmw2