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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

See that’s exactly the issue. You expect me to do work and spend time just to convince you to be standards-compliant.

How can I trust caddy complies with standards in other areas if caddy isn’t willing to follow the standard (which really doesn’t take much work) in this area? It’d be different if the de facto and the de jure standard diverged, as e.g., with IRC, but that’s not the case. nginx, Apache, IIS, Google’s GWS, they all follow the standard exactly, it’s just traefik and caddy that don’t.

It’s not an issue of this situation in of itself, it’s an issue of eroding trust. It’s the famous brown m&ms.

P.S.: Your arguments explain why implementing this would be a lot of work (keeping the ticket open as known issue is something I’d be fine with), but they can’t justify ignoring the standard and closing it as wontfix.

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> (which really doesn’t take much work)

Except it actually does take a lot of work, because it's not as simple as you make it out to be. It's very complex.

Look at the blog post I linked above from the author of cURL, looks at how much time was wasted just to support that "feature". If trailing dots weren't supported, there would be less code, and less headaches for everyone.

And either way, your argument that because we aren't "standards-compliant" here means we won't follow standards elsewhere is the slippery slope fallacy. Show us evidence of where we aren't standards compliant, then we'll talk.

I originally wrote a detailed response to this, but instead I’ll just say this:

It’s one thing to limit the scope of your project. cURL is trying to support every de facto and de jure standard out there, your project doesn’t have to. A lot of tail-end features have very diminishing returns. My own projects don’t do it either.

But it’s something entirely else if you just close the issues as WONTFIX, claim they’re not part of a standard (until you’re proven wrong), then claim it’s not used in the real world (it is, otherwise cURL wouldn’t implement it), then verbally attack users who point out that you’re not supporting it.

Just accept it, acknowledge that you’re not supporting it and that it’s not part of your scope. Own your faults, just be honest.

I’ve got far more persistent and far more annoying users complaining about missing features in Quasseldroid on every release or post for the past decade, but that’s no reason to get angry with them.

> then verbally attack users who point out that you’re not supporting it

I didn't verbally attack you. I just asked that you stop bringing it up on every thread where Caddy is mentioned. It causes us stress and wastes our time to have to re-explain ourselves the same way every time. Yes I used an aggressive tone, but it's because we're frustrated to continue hearing it. We always have in the back of our mind "is that one person going to post about trailing dot domains _again_?"

> Just accept it, acknowledge that you’re not supporting it and that it’s not part of your scope.

We did that. That's what a WONTFIX is.

Then why do you comment on it at all, if it causes you so much stress? I didn't claim anything wrong, did I? I didn't post in an unfriendly tone either?

It sounds like you don't accept that it's a shortcoming, instead trying to justify and excuse it.

You don't see the authors of nginx angrily complaining at you every time you comment on a post about their httpd. (Which this thread was about originally, after all)

Just a quick query from someone who has beginner level experience in NGINX and Caddy. Doesn't this PR [1] for Traefik imply that trailing dots for FQDNs are fixed?

[1] https://github.com/traefik/traefik/pull/4763

You can match hostnames with trailing dots in Caddy, too (and have been able to for years).

Just gonna be honest and just flat out state that I'm kind of lost on what's going on.

What is kuschku arguing against in ELI5 terms?

That it doesn't work implicitly in Caddy, without explicitly configuring Caddy with trailing dots.

That it’s neither supported by default, nor mentioned in the documentation. Which leads to people misconfiguring their webservers, e.g., https://caddyserver.com./ vs https://httpd.apache.org./

It is supported by default. Out of the box you can configure it this way.

It is not _configured_ by default. There is an important distinction.

It's not mentioned in documentation because the documentation [1] does not provide an _exhaustive_ list of the kinds of addresses that Caddy can be configured to serve.

1. https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/concepts#addresses

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