.tar.xz files are served with text/plain content-type by launchpadlibrarian

[Janne Snabb]

$ wget -O /dev/null http://launchpadlibrarian.net/56261240/downtimed-0.2.tar.xz
--2010-09-23 17:27:17-- http://launchpadlibrarian.net/56261240/downtimed-0.2.tar.xz
Resolving launchpadlibrarian.net... 91.189.89.229, 91.189.89.228
Connecting to launchpadlibrarian.net|91.189.89.229|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 73608 (72K) [text/plain]
Saving to: `/dev/null'
[..]

xz seems to be the hot newcomer of the tarball compression utilities. Projects are switching from bzip2 to xz because it saves space and decompresses faster.

However, as seen above, launchpadlibrarian sets text/plain mime type for these files. This means that if users try to download .tar.xz files with their browser, instead of getting a file save dialog, they get binary garbage on their display. I suppose the content-type should be application/x-tar, application/x-xz or application/octet-stream depending on ones preferences.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

This is distinct from bug 703807 because the file really is thought to be text/plain in the db (rather than it being served up with something other than what launchpad thinks it should have).

Looking at all libraryfilealias ending in .tar.xz, the vast majority are application/octet-stream, but there are some text-plain. In particluar, the oldest ones (prior to 2011-03) tend to be text/plain. I don't know if it gets set by the upload client or by Launchpad, or what changed around then. The most recent is PyGL3Display on 2011-05-26.

[David F. (malteworld)]

The same goes for other file types, for instance .tar.lzma (https://launchpadlibrarian.net/183118867/prebuilt-native-tools.tar.lzma).