Bug#1134366: www.debian.org: packages.debian.org requires javascript

Helge Kreutzmann <[email protected]> Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:23:28 +0000
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.www
Message-ID	<aeZTAFfPMuuKwcFD__24306.2806244538$1776702689$gmane$org@meinfjell.helgefjelltest.de>
Hello Holger,
thanks for handling this issue.

Am Sun, Apr 19, 2026 at 11:14:20PM +0200 schrieb Holger Wansing:
> Am 19. April 2026 10:33:12 MESZ schrieb Helge Kreutzmann <[email protected]>:
> >If I run e.g.
> >links https://packages.debian.org/bash
> >
> >I get:
> >   JavaScript is disabled in your browser.
> >
> >   Please enable JavaScript to proceed.
> >
> >   A required part of this site couldn’t load. This may be due to a browser extension, network issues, or browser settings. Please check your connection, disable any ad blockers, or try using a different browser.
> 
> I'm unable to reproduce this with different browsers.

I suspect this to be some kind of load balancing. It works
(sometimes), but then again not. Also I built in some kind of retry
mechanism in the scripts, sometimes they work on the first try,
sometimes they need (lots of) retries.

> >Of course, links does not understand javascript.
> >
> >I did this because some of the scripts for manpages-l10n[1] time out/fail 
> >currently and I'm checking why.
> 
> Maybe you should be more verbose about these scripts. Such as a salsa URL? 

https://salsa.debian.org/manpages-l10n-team/manpages-l10n/-/blob/master/upstream/debian-unstable/update-manpages.sh

Best to clone manpages-l10n, (its a few GB currently)
cd upstream/debian-unstable/
and run
script -c ./update-manpages.sh

When you see a single ".", the access succeeded on first try, When you
see multiple ".", then the script needed to retry many times.

Yesterday, it was very bad, then I saw lots of dots and the script
took very long to get all packages. I *assume* that this was caused by
some rate limiting, showing the java script page for my IP (and hence
in other browsers on this machine as well).

I now let it run through, and it showed no problem. I will run it
twice more and report if that changes something.

Do you have some anti-DDOS or rate-limiting in place for debian.org?

> Are you sure, these scripts are accessing packages.debian.org? I guess not.

You are guessing wrong.
If you look at the script, the core call is:
wget --quiet -O - "http://packages.debian.org/sid/amd64/$package/download"

where $package stores the Debian package in question (the script
iterates over all supported packages).

> Which error messages do you see from these scripts?

Currently a ".". If you need something else, I could of course try to
somehow store it (its a shell script, after all, but storing error
messages might be tricky, since pipes are involved).

> Otherwise, I fear noone can do anything on this bug...

Sure, I'm trying to provide all the information you need which you can
then link to the infrastructure knowledge of hosting Debians pages.

Greetings

            Helge
-- 
      Dr. Helge Kreutzmann                     [email protected]
           Dipl.-Phys.                   http://www.helgefjell.de/debian.php
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