Re: New Version Notification for draft-nottingham-httpbis-retry-01.txt

On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 5:20 PM, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:

>
> > On 2 Feb 2017, at 7:41 am, Tom Bergan <tombergan@chromium.org> wrote:
> >
> > > Applications sometimes want requests to be retried by
> > > infrastructure, but can't easily express them in a non-idempotent
> > > request (such as GET).
> >
> > nit: did you mean "in an idempotent request (such as GET)"?
>
> Thanks, fixed in source.
>
> >
> > > A client SHOULD NOT automatically retry a failed automatic retry.
> >
> > Why does RFC 7230 say this? I am aware of HTTP clients that completely
> ignore this suggestion, and I can't offhand think of a reason why this is a
> good rule-of-thumb to follow.
>
> Good question. The immediate answer is that RFC2616 said it, and RFC2068
> said it before that (and apparently introduced the requirement).
>
> If we end up revising the text regarding retries, that's something we
> should consider updating too.


Maybe it there was a concern about accidental DoS? Infinite retries are
probably a bad idea without exponential backoff.