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[ANN] Specification update

Solderpunk <solderpunk (a) posteo.net>

Greetings Geminauts,

I've just pushed the first changes to the official Gemini specification 
in close to one year!  As always the official specification can be 
viewed at:



You can also `git clone git://gemini.circumlunar.space/gemini-site` to 
see individual diffs for spec changes.

A quick preamble: in the gitlab.com repos set up by Sean to work on 
finalising the specification, the single document form of the current 
official spec has been replaced by two separate documents, one for the 
transport protocol and one for the markup language.  I think this is a 
good idea and I intend to adopt it for the official spec.  But I also 
want to work carefully through the proposed changes which made it into 
that repo and approve or reject them individually.  To facilitate this 
workflow it's easier for me, for now, to "backport" changes to the old 
format.  Once I've decided I'm happy with things I'll backport as much 
of the new writing as proves to be applicable when translating the 
format.  This is all a bit ugly, but it's not the end of the world.  
There's real value in having the diffs that actually change spec 
behaviour as opposed to wording/presentation be short and sweet.

Okay, I have made three changes:

1. Gemini URIs with empty paths (e.g. `gemini://example.com`) and those 
with paths of `/` (e.g. `gemini://example.com/`) are now equivalent by 
definition, and both clients and servers SHOULD normalise empty paths to 
`/` before sending/processing requests (along with applying other 
standard URI normalisations).
2. The use of the TLS `close_notify` mechanism is now mandatory (see 
sections 1.1 and 4).
3. The spec is now more explicit about clients not sending anything 
after a request and servers ignoring anything else they receive after a 
request.

You can find a little further explanation of my reasoning behind these 
changes in the corresponding Gitlab issues (#11, #2 and #40).

There are no major changes here.  `close_notify` was in fact *already* 
mandatory via the TLS specs, so we are just being very explicit by 
repeating that in the Gemini spec.  The tightened language in change 
three is just an attempt to close loopholes.  Nobody should have been 
doing any of the things it prohibits anyway.  If you were, you should 
feel bad.  The biggest change is the first one.  Depending on how you 
read RFC 3986, prior to this change it was maybe sorta technically okay 
for a server to serve different content from gemini://example.com and 
gemini://example.com/.  This is no longer allowed.  If you have actually 
been doing this you need to stop it, you strange, strange person.  Both 
client and server authors should also update their code to normalise 
URIs (see section 6.2.3 of RFC 3986).  Hopefully many will be able to 
rely on libraries to do this.  If you're forced to implement this by 
hand, the most important normalisation in practice is also one of the 
simplest: replace an empty path by a `/`.  This will help cut down on 
superfluous redirects.

Even if `close_notify` was not strictly required by the TLS RFCs, it 
would be logically necessary in Gemini, thanks to the lack of content 
length information, to disambiguate complete responses from erroneously 
or malisciously truncated responses.  There *are* servers out there 
which do not reliably use `close_notify`.  In principle clients visiting 
capsules at those servers should interpret this as something having gone 
wrong and e.g. notify the user or perhaps automatically retry the 
request.  In practice client authors may wish to "be gentle" for a 
little longer and give server authors time to catch on to this issue 
before making it difficult/ugly to visit their capsules.  Those who 
provide "torture test" services for server authors should certainly flag 
lack of `close_notify` as a problem.

Cheers,
Solderpunk

Link to individual message.

Solderpunk <solderpunk (a) posteo.net>

Oh dear, some kind of git hook failure means the updates aren't actually 
visible at the advertised locations.  I'm aware and working on it.  
Sorry!

Cheers,
Solderpunk

Link to individual message.

Philip Linde <linde.philip (a) gmail.com>

On Sun, 07 Nov 2021 15:50:09 +0000
Solderpunk <solderpunk at posteo.net> wrote:

> 1. Gemini URIs with empty paths (e.g. `gemini://example.com`) and those 
> with paths of `/` (e.g. `gemini://example.com/`) are now equivalent by 
> definition, and both clients and servers SHOULD normalise empty paths to 
> `/` before sending/processing requests (along with applying other 
> standard URI normalisations).

Excellent.

Overall a good set of small changes, basically all clarifications that
most implementations should already do right. This makes me hopeful
future changes to the spec will be of the same nature.

-- 
Philip

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Solderpunk <solderpunk (a) posteo.net>

Argh, my bad, the updates *were* visible I just forgot to commit the 
version number bump.  Fixed now.  Everything is under control, situation 
normal...

Cheers,
Solderpunk

On 07.11.2021 16:58, Solderpunk wrote:
> Oh dear, some kind of git hook failure means the updates aren't
> actually visible at the advertised locations.  I'm aware and working
> on it.  Sorry!
> 
> Cheers,
> Solderpunk

Link to individual message.

Stephane Bortzmeyer <stephane (a) sources.org>

On Sun, Nov 07, 2021 at 03:50:09PM +0000,
 Solderpunk <solderpunk at posteo.net> wrote 
 a message of 75 lines which said:

> 2. The use of the TLS `close_notify` mechanism is now mandatory (see
> sections 1.1 and 4).

This will be hard to enforce:

gemini://gemini.bortzmeyer.org/software/lupa/stats.gmi

48.3?% of URLs do NOT send a proper TLS shutdown (application
close). Even 36.1?% of those who return status 20 are in that case.

Link to individual message.

Solderpunk <solderpunk (a) posteo.net>

On 07.11.2021 17:09, Philip Linde wrote:

> Excellent.
> 
> Overall a good set of small changes, basically all clarifications that
> most implementations should already do right. This makes me hopeful
> future changes to the spec will be of the same nature.

My hope is that I can push small, simple batches of clarifications like 
this once every week or two for the rest of the year and settle most of 
the outstanding issues.  Ideally most of the changes will be such that 
most implementers need to either do nothing at all or make fairly minor 
and uncontroversial changes.  I don't want to *promise* there will be 
nothing bigger than this - but I'm reluctant to do things bigger than 
this and won't do it unless I really think I have to.

Cheers,
Solderpunk

Link to individual message.

Solderpunk <solderpunk (a) posteo.net>

This will be hard to enforce:
> 
> gemini://gemini.bortzmeyer.org/software/lupa/stats.gmi
> 
> 48.3?% of URLs do NOT send a proper TLS shutdown (application
> close). Even 36.1?% of those who return status 20 are in that case.

Well, then there are (and always has been) a lot of non-compliant 
servers out there.  It's not in my power to put something in the Gemini 
specification which contradicts what the TLS specifications say.

My hope is that a very large percentage of those URLs come from a 
relatively small number of server implementations and with a concerted 
effort we can improve things quickly.

Cheers,
Solderpunk

Link to individual message.

Jason McBrayer <jmcbray (a) carcosa.net>


Stephane Bortzmeyer <stephane at sources.org> writes:
> 48.3?% of URLs do NOT send a proper TLS shutdown (application
> close). Even 36.1?% of those who return status 20 are in that case.

Please let me know if carcosa.net is among those. Could you also post
a simple program or script for testing this? I feel like we *ought* to
be able to get server authors to fix this pretty easily, unless there
are issues with language bindings making it difficult.

-- 
Jason McBrayer      | ?Strange is the night where black stars rise,
jmcbray at carcosa.net | and strange moons circle through the skies,
                    | but stranger still is lost Carcosa.?
                    | ? Robert W. Chambers,The King in Yellow

Link to individual message.

Omar Polo <op (a) omarpolo.com>


Jason McBrayer <jmcbray at carcosa.net> writes:

> Stephane Bortzmeyer <stephane at sources.org> writes:
>> 48.3?% of URLs do NOT send a proper TLS shutdown (application
>> close). Even 36.1?% of those who return status 20 are in that case.
>
> Please let me know if carcosa.net is among those. Could you also post
> a simple program or script for testing this? I feel like we *ought* to
> be able to get server authors to fix this pretty easily, unless there
> are issues with language bindings making it difficult.

I always forgot the openssl(1) incantation to check for the close_notify
flag, but portal.mozz.us has a nice UI and clicking on '[view cert]' it
logs the close_notify alert status.

For carcosa.net seems to be absent :/

https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/carcosa.net?crt=1

Link to individual message.

Stephane Bortzmeyer <stephane (a) sources.org>

On Mon, Nov 08, 2021 at 09:28:41AM -0500,
 Jason McBrayer <jmcbray at carcosa.net> wrote 
 a message of 15 lines which said:

> Please let me know if carcosa.net is among those.

Indeed it is :-(

% agunua carcosa.net
Warning, no TLS shutdown received from the server
 ```
  __|                                        |
 (     _` |  _|_|  _ \(_-<  _` |     \   -_)  _|
\___|\__,_|_|\__|\___/___/\__,_|_)_| _|\___|\__|
 ```
============================================================

This is the Gemini site for carcosa.net. It is running on Germinal, a 
Gemini server in Common Lisp.

...


> Could you also post a simple program or script for testing this?

gemini://gemini.bortzmeyer.org/software/agunua/

("pip3 install agunua" will work if you have Python installed)

Link to individual message.

Philip Linde <linde.philip (a) gmail.com>

Hi Stephane!

On Mon, 8 Nov 2021 16:18:11 +0100
Stephane Bortzmeyer <stephane at sources.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 08, 2021 at 09:28:41AM -0500,
>  Jason McBrayer <jmcbray at carcosa.net> wrote 
>  a message of 15 lines which said:
> 
> > Please let me know if carcosa.net is among those.
> 
> Indeed it is :-(
> 
> % agunua carcosa.net
> Warning, no TLS shutdown received from the server

Very useful. I have not considered TLS in detail myself, but I tested
this just now with the Go TLS implementation which does seem to send
the proper notification as you call Close on connections. Good news for
people writing server implementations in Go, I think.

I wonder how hard it would be to automatically identify server software
that doesn't implement this properly. Probably some server software
could be differentiated based on their error code descriptions or how
they deal with some corner cases. If we could trace these capsules to a
few server implementations it might not be too much work to reach out
to the authors and poke at them about the spec change.

With the numbers you suggested earlier, I am wary of strictly enforcing
close_notify in my client, but in the interim maybe client authors
could warn as yours does, or provide some way to add domains to an
exception list.

-- 
Philip

Link to individual message.

Chris Brannon <chris (a) the-brannons.com>

Stephane Bortzmeyer <stephane at sources.org> writes:

>> Could you also post a simple program or script for testing this?
>
> gemini://gemini.bortzmeyer.org/software/agunua/
>
> ("pip3 install agunua" will work if you have Python installed)

The gemini-diagnostics tool
<https://github.com/michael-lazar/gemini-diagnostics> also does the
no-shutdown check.

-- Chris

Link to individual message.

Omar Polo <op (a) omarpolo.com>


Chris Brannon <chris at the-brannons.com> writes:

> Stephane Bortzmeyer <stephane at sources.org> writes:
>
>>> Could you also post a simple program or script for testing this?
>>
>> gemini://gemini.bortzmeyer.org/software/agunua/
>>
>> ("pip3 install agunua" will work if you have Python installed)
>
> The gemini-diagnostics tool
> <https://github.com/michael-lazar/gemini-diagnostics> also does the
> no-shutdown check.

I'm not sure that it works correctly.  I tried against gmid (my server)
and it always fails the close_notify test, even though both
portal.mozz.us and agunua agree that the close_notify alert is sent.

It's a useful tool otherwise.

> -- Chris

Link to individual message.

Stephane Bortzmeyer <stephane (a) sources.org>

On Mon, Nov 08, 2021 at 05:14:18PM +0100,
 Philip Linde <linde.philip at gmail.com> wrote 
 a message of 35 lines which said:

> I wonder how hard it would be to automatically identify server
> software that doesn't implement this properly. Probably some server
> software could be differentiated based on their error code
> descriptions or how they deal with some corner cases.

Yes, fingerprinting servers is certainly possible. Someone to take
this project?

Note that some servers send the TLS proper close for "normal" replies
but fail to do so when there is an error, such as 51. It helps with
fingerprinting, though.

Link to individual message.

Alex Schroeder <alex (a) alexschroeder.ch>

Regarding the closing of connections:
I know from using gemini-diagnostics that my server is one of those. I 
just use a generic Perl async server framework and call ?close_gracefully? 
at the end but somewhere in the layers of libraries from Mojo::IOLoop to 
IO::Socket::SSL to Net::SSLeay to OpenSSL somebody doesn?t handle this the 
way people expect it to work and I have no idea how to fix it (and I have 
stared at the source code of all these libraries for more hours than I 
cared for). So if anybody knows how to fix this using Perl, I?m interested 
in hearing about it. I got some helpful hints on Station so perhaps yet 
another look into it all will finally enlighten me.

-- 
Typed on a tiny keyboard. Sorry for being terse.

> On 8 Nov 2021, at 15:31, Jason McBrayer <jmcbray at carcosa.net> wrote:
> 
> ?
> Stephane Bortzmeyer <stephane at sources.org> writes:
>> 48.3 % of URLs do NOT send a proper TLS shutdown (application
>> close). Even 36.1 % of those who return status 20 are in that case.
> 
> Please let me know if carcosa.net is among those. Could you also post
> a simple program or script for testing this? I feel like we *ought* to
> be able to get server authors to fix this pretty easily, unless there
> are issues with language bindings making it difficult.

Link to individual message.

Jason McBrayer <jmcbray (a) carcosa.net>


Omar Polo <op at omarpolo.com> writes:
> For carcosa.net seems to be absent :/
> https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/carcosa.net?crt=1

Ugh, thanks. I will have to look into it, and just hope the wrapper I'm
using doesn't make it too difficult.

-- 
Jason McBrayer      | ?Strange is the night where black stars rise,
jmcbray at carcosa.net | and strange moons circle through the skies,
                    | but stranger still is lost Carcosa.?
                    | ? Robert W. Chambers,The King in Yellow

Link to individual message.

Jason McBrayer <jmcbray (a) carcosa.net>


Stephane Bortzmeyer <stephane at sources.org> writes:

> On Mon, Nov 08, 2021 at 09:28:41AM -0500,
>  Jason McBrayer <jmcbray at carcosa.net> wrote 
>  a message of 15 lines which said:
>
>> Please let me know if carcosa.net is among those.
>
> Indeed it is :-(

Thanks. Clearly, using cl+ssl in the default ways doesn't close the
connection properly; hopefully it won't be too difficult to make it
happen. 

-- 
Jason McBrayer      | ?Strange is the night where black stars rise,
jmcbray at carcosa.net | and strange moons circle through the skies,
                    | but stranger still is lost Carcosa.?
                    | ? Robert W. Chambers,The King in Yellow

Link to individual message.

nervuri <nervuri (a) disroot.org>

On Mon, 2021-11-08, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
>Note that some servers send the TLS proper close for "normal" replies
>but fail to do so when there is an error, such as 51.

Molly Brown among them, according to Agunua:

$ agunua gemini://rawtext.club/no-such-page
Warning, no TLS shutdown received from the server
Problem, Not found (extra message: "Not found!").

Link to individual message.

Stephane Bortzmeyer <stephane (a) sources.org>

On Tue, Nov 09, 2021 at 08:28:35AM +0000,
 nervuri <nervuri at disroot.org> wrote 
 a message of 9 lines which said:

> > Note that some servers send the TLS proper close for "normal" replies
> > but fail to do so when there is an error, such as 51.
> 
> Molly Brown among them, according to Agunua:

Indeed, see for instance the official site :-(

% agunua gemini.circumlunar.space
# Project Gemini

## Overview
...

% agunua gemini.circumlunar.space/doesnotexist
Warning, no TLS shutdown received from the server
Problem, Not found (extra message: "Not found!").

Link to individual message.

Jason McBrayer <jmcbray (a) carcosa.net>


Jason McBrayer <jmcbray at carcosa.net> writes:
> Thanks. Clearly, using cl+ssl in the default ways doesn't close the
> connection properly; hopefully it won't be too difficult to make it
> happen. 

I'm pleased to note that this was an upstream bug, in CL+SSL, which has
been fixed. Anyone who installed Germinal the default way (Roswell and
quicklisp) should run (ql:update-all-dists) and (ql:quickload :cl+ssl)
to upgrade their CL+SSL and restart Germinal.

I added a line of code to explicitly close TLS streams, but I don't
believe it was actually needed; CL+SSL should be doing the right thing
when streams are implicitly closed.

-- 
Jason McBrayer      | ?Strange is the night where black stars rise,
jmcbray at carcosa.net | and strange moons circle through the skies,
                    | but stranger still is lost Carcosa.?
                    | ? Robert W. Chambers,The King in Yellow

Link to individual message.

Krixano <krixano (a) protonmail.com>

Forwarding the message I sent below to the rest of the mailing list as I 
accidentally hit "Reply" instead of "Reply All".

Christian Seibold

Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

??????? Original Message ???????

On Sunday, November 14th, 2021 at 7:37 PM, Krixano <krixano at protonmail.com> wrote:

> I wanted to write here to confirm that anything using the Gig Framework 
(https://github.com/pitr/gig) should be doing close_notify correctly, as I 
checked my capsule with portal.mozz.us for this case. I'll also notify the 
developer as well.
>
> Christian Seibold
>
> Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.
>

Link to individual message.

Krixano <krixano (a) protonmail.com>

Correction, I looked into it further. The Gig Framework does the 
close_notify correctly on most pages, but does not do it for pages that 
give error codes (I haven't checked all error codes yet, but I have 
checked the not found error code).

Christian Seibold

Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

> ??????? Original Message ???????
>
> On Sunday, November 14th, 2021 at 7:37 PM, Krixano krixano at protonmail.com wrote:
>
> > I wanted to write here to confirm that anything using the Gig 
Framework (https://github.com/pitr/gig) should be doing close_notify 
correctly, as I checked my capsule with portal.mozz.us for this case. I'll 
also notify the developer as well.
> >
> > Christian Seibold
> >
> > Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

Link to individual message.

Krixano <krixano (a) protonmail.com>

So, I've tested some capsules with agunua. This is the list of capsules 
that have had close_notify on pages that were found, but did not have it 
on pages that were not found. This list is also every single url that I've 
tested so far where the issue has come up - all of the tests have just 
been for the Not Found errorcode. I have also included the server software (if known):

gemini://gemini.bortzmeyer.org/blashsdfh - gemserv
gemini://skyjake.fi/blahkslhdf
gemini://astrobotany.mozz.us/blahssldhslh
gemini://botond.online/blashlhsdfh
station.martinrue.com/blahsdlhsdlfh
gemini://kwiecien.us/blajjjsdhsdh - geminid
gemini://auragem.space/notfound - Gig Framework
gemini.circumlunar.space/blahdhd - Molly Brown
gemini://geminispace.info/blashldshfsldhf
gemini://marginalia.nu/blahdslkhdfh - custom server
gemini://gemini.thegonz.net/aslhsdlhfsdfh
gemini://geminiquickst.art/blashdslfhsldhf
gemini://nytpu.com/blahsdlhfsfdlh
gemini://konpeito.media/blashsldhsdlfh
gemini://rawtext.club/blashsldh
gemini://srht.site/blashlsdhf
gemini://godocs.io/blashdlfkh

I just want to make sure about this, are we sure agunua is reporting 
things correctly? I find it odd that *every single server* I've tested has 
had this problem with the notfound errorcode, but not with successful requests.

Christian Seibold

Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

??????? Original Message ???????

On Sunday, November 14th, 2021 at 8:44 PM, Krixano <krixano at protonmail.com> wrote:

> Correction, I looked into it further. The Gig Framework does the 
close_notify correctly on most pages, but does not do it for pages that 
give error codes (I haven't checked all error codes yet, but I have 
checked the not found error code).
>
> Christian Seibold
>
> Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.
>
> > ??????? Original Message ???????
> >
> > On Sunday, November 14th, 2021 at 7:37 PM, Krixano krixano at protonmail.com wrote:
> >
> > > I wanted to write here to confirm that anything using the Gig 
Framework (https://github.com/pitr/gig) should be doing close_notify 
correctly, as I checked my capsule with portal.mozz.us for this case. I'll 
also notify the developer as well.
> > >
> > > Christian Seibold
> > >
> > > Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

Link to individual message.

BalΓ‘zs Botond <balazsbotond (a) gmail.com>

On Mon, Nov 15, 2021 at 4:29 AM Krixano <krixano at protonmail.com> wrote:
>
> I just want to make sure about this, are we sure agunua is reporting 
things correctly? I find it odd that *every single server* I've tested has 
had this problem with the notfound errorcode, but not with successful requests.

I filed a bug for the server I use (Agate) and from the maintainer's
comment it seems that there is indeed a problem with Agunua:
https://github.com/mbrubeck/agate/issues/100#issuecomment-965174851

Link to individual message.

Jason McBrayer <jmcbray (a) carcosa.net>


Krixano <krixano at protonmail.com> writes:

> I just want to make sure about this, are we sure agunua is reporting
> things correctly? I find it odd that *every single server* I've tested
> has had this problem with the notfound errorcode, but not with
> successful requests.

I believe agunua has a problem with reporting no close_notify on error
pages, reporting that it is absent whether it was actually sent or
not. I spent some time over the weekend fixing this issue in Germinal,
making sure that the same code-paths were used for both 2x responses and
for errors, but agunua still reported no close_notify for 51 pages. I
checked the same error pages with portal.mozz.us, and it *is* seeing the
close_notify being sent. So, I'm going to assume the error is in agunua.

-- 
Jason McBrayer      | ?Strange is the night where black stars rise,
jmcbray at carcosa.net | and strange moons circle through the skies,
                    | but stranger still is lost Carcosa.?
                    | ? Robert W. Chambers,The King in Yellow

Link to individual message.

Alex // nytpu <alex (a) nytpu.com>

Luckily it's pretty easy to test this with openssl's s_client, it'll say
"closed" at the end if the connection was closed properly:

  printf "gemini://nytpu.com/about.gmi\r\n" |
    openssl s_client -ign_eof -connect nytpu.com:1965

outputs:

  depth=0 O = nytpu, CN = nytpu.com
  verify error:num=18:self signed certificate
  [...handshake and cert info...]
  20 text/gemini; lang=en-US
  [...the actual response body (if success response code)...]
  [...end-of-connection info...]
  closed

Here's a handy little shell function where you give it a URI and it'll
check if it's closed properly or not:

  test_close_notify() {
    hostname="$(printf "$1" | sed -e 's/[^/]*\/\/\([^@]*@\)\?\([^:/]*\).*/\2/')"
    output="$(printf "%s\r\n" "$1" |
      openssl s_client -ign_eof -connect "${hostname}:1965" 2>&1 |
      tail -n1 | tr -d '\n')"
    if [ "${output}" = "closed" ]; then
      printf "close_notify for '%s' properly recieved.\n" "$1" >&2
    else
      printf "close_notify for '%s' not received!\n" "$1" >&2
    fi
  }

~nytpu

-- 
Alex // nytpu
alex at nytpu.com
gpg --locate-external-key alex at nytpu.com

Link to individual message.

Stephane Bortzmeyer <stephane (a) sources.org>

On Mon, Nov 15, 2021 at 03:28:44AM +0000,
 Krixano <krixano at protonmail.com> wrote 
 a message of 63 lines which said:

> gemini://gemini.bortzmeyer.org/blashsdfh - gemserv

Actually Stargazer, no longer Gemserv.

> I just want to make sure about this, are we sure agunua is reporting
> things correctly? I find it odd that *every single server* I've
> tested has had this problem with the notfound errorcode, but not
> with successful requests.

Under investigation:
<https://framagit.org/bortzmeyer/agunua/-/issues/50>

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