How common is it for mirrors to sync a subset of the languages, rather
than everything that we have to offer?
Well, I don't know. I don't think so that official mirrors have language mirroring restrictions, but there could be. We have a rule that mirrors should have the content offered by rsync.php.net by the way...
Trying a non-existant language, such as this:
http://www.php.net/manual/ek/function.fopen.php
sends back our search page with a no-documents matched result.
There are two things we can try here:
1. Allow the browser to attempt to navigate to the page. If it is
there, thats fine. Otherwise, can can fix that search page to recognize
a manual lookup and rewrite it to english and redirect from there.
2. stat() the result returned from the database lookup.
I'm biased towards the first option; www.php.net has everything there is
to offer, so the stat() call there would be a waste of time on that box.
For mirrors, 1. is considerably more expensive than a single stat call.
I suppose we could have a third option:
3. Like 2, but make it conditional on the servername (!= 'www.php.net'),
then stat().
As php.net has all the languages, this is not a problem for php.net. So we can allow the user to go to that page IMHO catch it and redirect him to the English one, or present a page that this mirror does not support his selected language...
Goba