Announcements - 9 – Serendipity

This is just a reference posting to indicate something important going on. Please read here on the process of the Serendipity source code repository being about to move to GitHub

Read the posting on the s9y forums

Serendipity's code repository is being hosted on BerliOS for several years. Their free service is now closing down, which means that Serendipity will move its versioning control to a new provider.

The current idea is to migrate SVN over to GitHub.com. This might even motivate some new contributors to get accustomed with the Serendipity core code and make contributing patches easier.

We are planning to move the code repository at the end of October and will keep you posted here. If there are people reading this who are well familiar with Git and especially SVN migration, please step up here or in the forums to help us in the process.

Asides from the SVN service, Serendipity is currently using this infrastructure:

• A self-hosted webserver providing a phpBB board on http://board.s9y.org. This is quite active and will stay in the future.
• A self-hosted wiki software on http://www.s9y.org/ that allows for a custom navigation and wiki documentation by users. We might switch this to another software, but are not happy with the way MediaWiki handles navigation. We'll see if GitHub is an option to power this.
• A self-hosted Serendipity installation on http://blog.s9y.org/
• The http://spartacus.s9y.org/ plugin and theme repository, hosted on SourceForge.Net
• The code repository for plugins and themes, also hosted on SourceForge.Net and maintained through CVS. Depending on the usage license of GitHub, we are looking into if we can merge plugins/templates and the Core code on GitHub.
• A issue tracker, hosted on SourceForge.net. We might utilize the GitHub-Tracker for this in the future.
• A mailinglist, that is not very active anymore, also hosted on SourceForge.Net. Since we favor the s9y forums, we might not further spend time on changing this mailinglist.

Christian Boltz notified us and provided a patch to fix the spartacus plugin properly being able to retrieve remote files. This became necessary when SourceForge.net changed their underlying structure.

If you are using Spartacus, you have several possibilities to fix this issue for you:

1: Manually download the updated plugin file plugins/ serendipity_event_spartacus/ serendipity_event_spartacus.php from here: serendipity_event_spartacus.php for Serendipity 1.6 / Development, serendipity_event_spartacus.php for Serendipity 1.5.

2: You can also simply configure your spartacus plugin and enable the use of Netmirror.org, or you can enter a custom mirror: http://php-blog.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/php-blog/|http://netmirror.org/mirror/serendipity/

3: You can also simply edit your serendipity_event_spartacus.php file and replace all 2 occurences of the string *checkout* with viewvc.

Thanks to Christian for notifying us!

Thanks to Stefan Schurtz, who reported a XSS issue in the serendipity_event_freetag plugin (SSCHADV2011-004). The issue was fixed in version 3.22 of the plugin, you can fetch the update through Spartacus or download via Spartacus.s9y.org.

The bug was introduced in version 3.20 of the plugin. Users of the plugin should upgrade, as it allows malicious users to trick people into visiting a specially crafted link on your blog to steal cookie login information for example, if you click on such a link.

The Internet Explorer 9 has been released a few days ago. It's a great improvement over old versions, despite of one mayor breakage.

Usually, a web-browser requests a CSS URL with a variety of HTTP-headers. The "Accept" HTTP-Header instructs the remote server, which valid content-types it can handle. In the past, most web-browsers sent a "Accept: text/css; */*" header, which means they prefer "text/css", but would also interpret any other file types as CSS.

Now, the IE9 does no longer send */* as an accepted content-Type, thus it will now ONLY render stylesheets if they have the Content-Type "text/css". If that does not happen, IE9 complains with a "HTTP 406" error and refuses to parse/render the stylesheet.

That does not sound so bad yet, but many web-applications (including Serendipity) provide dynamic CSS stylesheets that hide behind a PHP file. Serendipity compiles this PHP through a file called "serendipity.css.php". If URL rewriting is enabled, to mask that PHP file, a RewriteRule is added that will accept "serendipity.css" and send it to the main serendipity index.php file, which in turn will include serendipity.css.php and deliver the appropriate output.

Now certain Apache setups use a module mod_negotiation that will detect "Hey- there's a file serendipity.css.php, but the browser requested serendipity.css. He surely must be mistaken, I better serve up this serendipity.css.php file instead". Sadly, it does so, BEFORE executung mod_rewrite that would "fix" this behaviour.

Finally - mod_negotiate would basically properly execute the PHP file and return valid CSS. But it does that by returning a Content-Type that matches the original negotiated request, which is "application/x-httpd-php". IE9 will receive this, and refuse to render the proper CSS, because it does not accept */*.

IMHO this is a very bad mixture of several components acting weird altogether. But the easiest place to fix this is inside IE9, to restore the "Accept" behaviour of all other major browsers, so that mod_negotiated sites will not break.

I have posted on a IE9 Team blog since it seems, Microsoft does not accept bug reports anywhere. If anybody knows of a proper place to get a hold of their team, please let us know.

FINALLY - WHAT YOU CAN DO IF THIS AFFECTS YOUR SERENDIPITY BLOG:

Edit your .htaccess file, and add the directive Options -Multiviews at the top of the file. As long as your server has the AllowOveride ability enabled for you (that's mostly the case, as soon as you are allowed to use mod_rewrite) you can remove the negotiation feature of Apache.

This change in the default .htaccess will also be part of upcoming Serendipity versions.

Clarification: This is not only IE9's fault, but rather a bad combination of multiple factors: One being that s9y has a .php file called the same way like a rewritten URL. One being that mod_negotiate does not pass a request through to mod_rewrite and fatally catches it before other means are not used up. And the last being that IE9 does not accept a fallback contenttype for CSS.

The reason why I think this should be considered a IE9 bug, is because the restrictive parsing stats against current plans to make the web as accessible as possible. XHTML actually failed in its restrictive, XML-based parsing (google mime-type application/x-html+xml) was stomped down in favor of a lax HTML5 parsing. Users should never be locked out of content, and that's why I think a fallback */* should not hurt. This allows for applications to overcome mod_negotiate and allows the browser to evaluate the final Content-Type, and not an intermediate negotiated one.

This week, the SourceForge.Net servers have been attacked. Since the Serendipity project hosts files and our plugin's CVS on SourceForge's provided servers, this also affects our maintaineance and distribution of plugins through Spartacus.

For people having problems, you can manually download plugins through spartacus.s9y.org. You should be able to choose netmirror.org as the spartacus mirror as well.

Normal services should be restored in a few days. For the longer run, our team might move plugin repositories from CVS to SVN or even Git, but changing this will take some time (and discussion).