Is pkg site forbidden by brower?

[Michael Gmelin]

> On 6. Sep 2020, at 12:00, Niclas Zeising <zeising+freebsd at daemonic.se> wrote:
> 
> On 2020-09-06 09:00, grarpamp wrote:
>>> On 9/6/20, Kevin Oberman <rkoberman at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 8:04 PM Yoshihiro Ota <ota at j.email.ne.jp> wrote:
>>>> Is "403 Forbidden" an intended response for a brower access to
>>>> http://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:12:i386/ nowdays?
>>>> 
>>>> I used to see available packages with a brower and decided which one to
>>>> use.
>> Some more people have noted this change
>> as breaking tool scripts, etc.
>> And useful meta files are unfortunately now invisible:
>> packagesite.txz, meta.txz, pkg.txz, pkg.txz.sig
>> If someone want to block the '/.../All/' dir full of pkgs,
>> maybe, but do not block any other part of the hier.
> 
> The reason that folder listing was disabled on the package download sites is that it used too much resources.  For every hit on those URLs, the web server had to dynamically generate the folder listing, and send it.  This caused DDoS-like scenarios, where these were hit repeatedly, which caused problems for legitimate traffic.  Since the relevant information is available in the txz files above, and also on freshports, and since pkg have no need for directory listing, it was disabled.
> 

Is this part of why pkg repos are performing so much better recently? I‘m quite happy about that :)

If there’s a use case for having access to this information, we could simply provide it through a static index.html that’s recreated every time the directory changes.

Cheers,
Michael