[drupal-devel] [bug] Podcasting feeds broken

Tue Sep 13 04:31:47 UTC 2005

Issue status update for 
http://drupal.org/node/21924
Post a follow up: 
http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/21924

 Project:      Drupal
-Version:      4.6.0
+Version:      cvs
-Component:    node.module
+Component:    file system
 Category:     bug reports
 Priority:     normal
 Assigned to:  walkah
 Reported by:  gregmills
 Updated by:   walkah
 Status:       patch (ready to be committed)

this is actually a file.inc (file_create_url) issue. (and applies to
HEAD as well)

walkah

Previous comments:
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Tue, 03 May 2005 15:26:17 +0000 : gregmills

I was trying to work this out on the forums and Dries Buytaert suggested
I post a bug report so here's what's going on:

If I set the "Download Method" setting to "Public" then the link in the
RSS enclosure for my Podcast is absolute and fully qualified but lands
on a Drupal "page not found" error page. This setting also breaks all
the photos in my galleries. Furthermore, if I put the location of the
image on the server in the address bar of my browser I get the Drupal
"Page Not Found" error page. Isn't this the opposite of how "Public" is
supposed to work.

Setting the download method to "Private" fixes the galleries but then
all my RSS enclosures are converted to relative links. These don't seem
to work at all in Podcast recieving programs (I'm testing with iPodder
and Doppler). I checked the RSS of some of the other Podcasts that I
listen to and all their enclosures have absolute links to the media
files.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wed, 11 May 2005 02:27:41 +0000 : gregmills

Would it be possible for me to just patch the code where the following
line is generated?

If I could just get it to add in my full URL I think everything would
work fine.

ex:

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Wed, 11 May 2005 02:29:03 +0000 : gregmills

Sorry,

Change:
<enclosure url="system/files?file=050805.mp3" length="5205243"
type="audio/mpeg"/>

to:
<enclosure
url="http://www.miamichurch.org/system/files?file=050805.mp3"
length="5205243" type="audio/mpeg"/>

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sat, 14 May 2005 02:49:34 +0000 : gregmills

I found it and changed it myself but it didn't alter the behavior.

With the download method set to "private" iPodder finds the feeds and
see the "episodes." But when it tries to download the episode it just
says "downloading" but never makes any progress. I can enter the URL
exactly as it appears in the enclosures into my web browser and it
downloads just fine.

I downloaded the XML from a feed that I knew worked and I substituted
the URL from Drupal's enclosure into it. Then I saved it back to my
server and subscribed to it in iPodder. The result was exactly the
same. It still says "Downloading" but never makes any progress. It
doesn't work in Doppler either.

With the download method set to "public" iPodder downloads Drupal's
"Page Not Found" page with the MP3's filename. This setting also breaks
all the photos in my gallery.

I've spent a lot of time trying to isolate the cause of this and I'm
getting nowhere. I've also been searching Google and fishing in
Drupal's forum for a working example of Podcast in Drupal and I can't
find one. Everyone doing a Podcast is currently using Feedburner to
create the feed. I upgraded the priority to critical because I believe
that this is important functionality that may be completely unusable. I
hope that's alright.

Any help is greatly appreciated and I've turned on mail so I can work
directly with whoever will look into this. My programming experience is
very limited but if I can help troubleshoot in any way then I am
available.

Thanks

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wed, 01 Jun 2005 21:36:15 +0000 : zirafa

Check out echoditto's podcast at radio.echoditto.com.  It might help to
ask them how they got theirs working.  As for this podcasting problem,
it seems like there should be a way to fix it by inserting the site_url
variable or something right before the path so that the result is a
completely absolute path when the enclosure url is created.  I don't
have the means to immediately fix this but I can see how this
completely breaks anybody that is trying to use drupal to make podcasts
(including myself).  I'll work with you on pushing this and fixing this,
Greg, but my drupal coding knowledge is pretty basic.  You can get in
touch with me by emailing me directly.
Farsheed

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 08:55:32 +0000 : Bèr Kessels

Could you please share the url of the feed? without that it remains wild
guessing.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 08:56:30 +0000 : Bèr Kessels

oh, and IMHO this is not "critical". Maybe for you it is, but "critical"
is meant as "critical for drupal"

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 23:14:28 +0000 : gregmills

Critical... Normal... It doesn't matter. Either way it's been a month
and a half since I first posted. I've managed to piece together
workarounds for several problems I discovered in the process of setting
up my feed. It's working now and I'm focusing on making the RSS output
compatible with iTunes.

Unfortunately, I'm not a PHP programmer so most of my workarounds
involve taking out dynamic references in the source and hard-coding it
for my site. The fixes aren't transferable so I don't really have
anything I can share back to the community. This also takes me out of
the main development trunk so I don't know what's going to happen when
I apply the next upgrade.

I've gotten a little help by posting in the forums and posting bug
reports but for the most part I've been on my own in fixing problems
I've found with Podcasting in Drupal. If the community wants this
software to spread the community is going to have to become more
diligent about addressing issues like this in a timely manner.
Podcasting support was a key factor in my decision to use Drupal and
this site was not shy about advertising it as a feature. Still, I don't
know of any Podcast created entirely in Drupal other than my own. All
the ones I've seen use a third party web service.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 23:27:04 +0000 : chx

You speak a lot and tell us little. Ber asked for the feed URL but you
have not given it. 

We do not know anything about your setup. Webserver, PHP version,
Drupal base URL etc.

Before criticizing the community, create a proper bug report. And guess
what -- if you google on good bug report you'll get two excellent
documents in the top three...

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fri, 01 Jul 2005 22:47:38 +0000 : gregmills

None of that matters now. I messed around in the code for a couple of
weeks and finally got it to work on my own.

Check the date on the original report, it was almost two months ago.
I'm not criticizing anyone. This is free software so I don't expect any
kind of "customer" support. I'm simply recommending that if you want the
install base for Drupal to grow the response time to requests for help
is probably something that needs to be considered. You can take that as
a criticism or you can take it as advice.

Rest assured, you won't be getting anymore improper bug reports from
me.

If anyone is curious there is an actual working Drupal generated
Podcast feed at:
http://www.miamichurch.org/taxonomy/term/11/0/feed

That's mine, and it's the only one I know of.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sun, 03 Jul 2005 07:52:46 +0000 : Bèr Kessels

Greg, 

You must really try to be more polite when posting in the drupal
issues. Your comment about us no knowing what wwe should do to get our
software spread is insulting, and so is your comment about our timing.

If you dont like the way drupal works, then change it, or move ver to
another community. Insulting people definately does not work.

Oh, and BTW, afaik drupals uploads are used as aclosed files in any
feeds, so we automagically have podcasting!

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 02:40:29 +0000 : gregmills

You guys are totally reading way too much into this. I do appreciate
your offer for assistance. It's just that it's a month and a half too
late. There's no hard feelings and I intend to continue to use Drupal.
I just think perhaps we should look at how issues like mine are
addressed.

I do not believe that Podcasting works "automagically" in Drupal. If it
did, I think you'd be able to find more people than just me doing it. In
fact, it would probably make Drupal one of the leading platforms for
Pocasting. Instead of getting all indignant with me about the tone that
you're reading into my comments, why doesn't somebody just look into
this?

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 14:06:41 +0000 : dumell

If your Drupal 4.6 has "access control" set to "public", podcasting will
work out-of-the-box automagically. Great.

But if your site has "access control" set to "private" - and there may
be very good reasons to user this setting - you will probably not be
able to get podcasting to work at all.

And changing access control setting once you are up and running will
probably mess things up.

I have gone down the same road as Greg on this one. First I noted that
if you use "public", your RSS feed will have absolute addresses to the
MP3 files, like this:
<enclosure url="http://example.com/system/files?file=test.mp3"
length="223680" type="audio/mpeg" />
and if you have "access control" set to "private" the links will be
relative and your RSS will contain something like this:

<enclosure url="/system/files?file=test.mp3" length="223680"
type="audio/mpeg" />

In this case, using relative url's, podcasting clients like ipodder and
doppler will not be able to download your MP3 files. I presumed the
fault was the relative url, although the XML file started with a base
url definition like:

<rss version="2.0" xml:base="http://example.com">

However, tweaking the upload.module (line 306 in version 1.31.2.5
2005/05/25) to force a "http://example.com/" to be inserted before the
url to make it absolute, did not help. And yes, anonymous users have
access to files.

So I tried to download the file directly from the original HTML node
with IE. On the HTML page of the node, the base url is defined as
"http://example.com" and the link to the MP3 file is relative as
"system/files?file=test.mp3". If I place the pointer on the link, IE
tells me that the url to the file is:
"http://example.com/system/files?file=test.mp3", no surprises here.
When I click on the link to the MP3 file, a IE file download requestor
appares saying "file name: text.mp3". And if I confirm, the file is
downloaded correctly.

But if I right click on the link and use copy shortcut
"http://example.com/system/files?file=test.mp3", IE opens a file
requestor and tells me the name of the file is "files?file=test.mp3".
This is a suprise. And if I confirm this, IE will tell me that it can
not download the file because it is "not albe to open the internet
site".

So, with a base url defined and a relative link to the file in the html
page, I can download the file, but if I try to paste the absolute path
to the file into IE, I can not download the file.

With Firefox both alternatives work.

Unfortunatelly, it seems both iPodder and Doppler runs into the same
problem that IE does. Switching of "clean url's" does not make any
difference.

Is the HTTP request to drupals access control mechanism (that
system/files?file= thingie) getting corrupt in some way, or Drupal
returning a HTTP respons that is not accepted by most clients? We are
using Drupals multi-site feature and this might be adding to our
problems. The problem does not seem to be in upload.module but perhaps
in node.module?

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Tue, 09 Aug 2005 14:43:58 +0000 : dumell

Obviously I tried to write too much text at once :)

If your access control is set to public, the absolute links will not
look like in my example above, since they will not contain that
"/system/files?file=" -thingie. It would instead look something like
"http://example.com/files/test.mp3". And this is important since
requesting the file TROUGH Drupal instead of directly from the web
server is what seems to be causing the problem for many or all
(podcast) clients, atleast in a multi-site setup.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 14:46:17 +0000 : Boris Mann

I can confirm this.

This is the same issue with *all* enclosures if files are set to
"private". Something is busted somewhere, this needs to be fixed for
both 4.6 and 4.7.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 04:27:32 +0000 : walkah

Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/file-create_url.patch (625 bytes)

attached patch fixes (by using full url - just like "public files"
does).