Re: [htdig-dev] 3.2RC1 Feature Freeze

[Gabriele B. <bar...@in...>]

At 18.10 13/10/2003 -0600, Neal Richter wrote:
>On Tue, 14 Oct 2003, Gabriele Bartolini wrote:
> > 3) Fixing the 'Accept-Encoding' bug of the HTTP 1/1 protocol (see bug
> > #594790). My solution, waiting to correctly handle gzipped contents (if you
> > think it is reasonable doing it now, I could think about that) is just to
> > send an empty 'Accept-Encoding' header, which lets the server know that our
> > user agent is only able to manage document with the 'identity' encoding.
> > Otherwise - the actual case - if no header is sent, the server assumes we
> > can handle every kind of encoding.
>
>I'll leave this up to you.  Does your fix solve the problem completely?

I have committed the simple patch, which solves the bug #594790. Now the 
request - according to me - becomes a feature request, that is to say to 
handle the compressed contents.

This should not be a problem, but IMHO could lead to some portability 
problems that I would rather avoid now. Indeed, we should enable it only if 
zlib is present. Let me know.

Now, the HTTP request always includes an empty Accept-Encoding header (this 
informs the server that htdig is only able to manage documents that are not 
encoded. Before, no Accept-Encoding was sent, letting the server assume 
that the client was capable of handling every content encoding - i.e. 
zipped documents with Apache's mod_gzip module.

>1) Is your potential code fix large?

The fix is extremely simple (one line) and should not lead to problems.

>2) Can it be fixed in a timely manner?

Yep. Done.

>3) Is is important enough to delay 3.2?

I refer this question to the feature request. I think this is not urgent 
and I consider 3.2 more important than adding this feature, even though I 
suggest putting it into the TODO list for the next release.

>4) Does the bug affect enough users to be important in the short-term?

Potentially yes. Indeed, for mod_gzip Apache servers this could have led to 
some problems.

Ciao
-Gabriele
--
Gabriele Bartolini: Web Programmer, ht://Dig & IWA/HWG Member, ht://Check 
maintainer
Current Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
bar...@in... | http://www.prato.linux.it/~gbartolini | ICQ#129221447
 > "Leave every hope, ye who enter!", Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, The 
Inferno