Re: Simple Proposal for setting HTTP headers

On 2013-07-22 06:29, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
> Hello Tobie,
> 
> Many thanks for your answers.
> 
> On 2013/07/21 17:07, Tobie Langel wrote:
>> On Saturday, July 20, 2013 at 9:35 AM, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:
>>> On 2013/07/19 23:09, Tobie Langel wrote:
>>>> On Friday, July 19, 2013 at 8:18 AM, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:
>>>>> There is certainly a downside with tying in with Apache, but 
>>>>> whatever we
>>>>> use, we'll be tying in with something, either some specific server 
>>>>> or
>>>>> some specific software of ours, or so.
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Yes.
>>>>> The possibility to just put the stuff on a server e.g. for testing 
>>>>> in
>>>>> private before submitting tests looks important to me.
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> It's important to everyone, but complex testing scenarios (like 
>>>> dealing with HTTP headers) require server-side code. There's nothing 
>>>> we can do against that.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> Yes. The way I'm putting the question is "do we want to use existing
>>> code (where available), or do we want to write all of this 
>>> ourselves?",
>>> 
>> 
>> Existing code (.htaccess) has a dependency we don't want to have: 
>> Apache. So either way we'll be writing code.
> 
> I got as far as understanding that some people don't want to depend
> on Apache. I haven't yet understood why. Pointer or explanation
> appreciated.

Well from the point of view of browser vendors, installing apache on 
all the thousands of test machines across multiple OSes and devices 
isn't a winning proposition; it is too complex and heavyweight and at 
the end of the day is designed to be a production server rather than a 
testing server, so it makes the wrong kind of tradeoffs.

Once you have accepted that you don't want apache in that environment 
you don't want it anywhere. Although there are people talking as if the 
test server should just be a swappable component, the reality is that 
you want everyone running exactly the same code, otherwise you just have 
one more source of difficult-to-debug differences between the tests as 
run in different environments.

> The format itself works for both textual and binary files alike, and
> that seemed quite clear to me. Therefore, I interpreted your question
> as "how would I actually create such a file", and showed that it can
> be very easy.

FWIW, .asis-like approaches seem reasonable to me, but they have a 
number of disadvantages. In particular every file has to be treated 
fully and independently; you can't say "all css files in this directory 
have header X in addition to the default ones".

> Sorry I was a bit negative, but my assumption is still that different
> code may be needed for different servers, or otherwise we just end up
> with a limited list of servers.

We should have a limited list of 1 server, written in python, that is 
the supported server for running tests.

Received on Monday, 22 July 2013 07:41:16 UTC