Subject: Re: bug#16733: messed up unicode chars in package description

From: Stefan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 11:55:27 -0400

>> I don't know, but ignoring 404 errors seems like a bug to me.
> url-insert-file-contents acts like visiting the URL. If you go to
> http://www.gnu.org/nonexistent, the fact that the page does not exist
> is an error from your POV. But your web browser receives the error
> page just fine and displays it like any other page (the fact that HTTP
> returned 404 is metadata for the action).

I think for url-insert-file-contents, the intention is to pretend URLs
make up a virtual file-system (that's the point of url-handlers.el).
>From this point of view http://www.gnu.org/nonexistent is a file that
doesn't exist.  So url-insert-file-contents should signal an error just
like insert-file-contents would.

> If the caller wants a different behavior, they should be using other
> lower level url functions, not url-insert-file-contents.

I think it's the other way around: if the caller really wants to see the
particular error page that www.gnu.org decided to return, then he should
use a lower level URL function.

Similarly, url-insert-file-contents should (and does, IIUC) follow
redirections so you get to the the destination of the redirection rather
than the redirection page itself.

        Stefan