Re: PATCH draft

On Wed, 4 Feb 2009, Julian Reschke wrote:

>
> Lisa Dusseault wrote:
>> Sure.  But the client code I sent would break that server's model.
>
> You mean this one...?
>
>>         etag.weak = (value[:2] == "W/")
>>                if etag.weak:
>>             etag.tag = value[2:]
>>         else:
>>             etag.tag = value
>
> That's hard to tell unless we know what the client is going to do with it.
>
>> There's nowhere in the spec that says that you can compare a weak ETag to a 
>> strong ETag by stripping the "W/".
>
> Well, a client can do that, but in general it's not going to have the desired 
> effect.
>
> I'm not sure what your point is... That there are servers and clients out 
> there which are broken with respect to weak etag handling? I agree with that, 
> but I do not agree that this means the PATCH spec should rule out their use.
>
> BR, Julian
>
> PS: And, btw, httpbis currently *does* define that W/"foo" and "foo" match 
> weakly; see 
> <http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-httpbis-p4-conditional-05.html#rfc.section.5> 
> and <http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/71>.

Which just might be why that code fragment parses off the W/ and remembers 
it with the etag.weak boolean.

Received on Wednesday, 4 February 2009 19:02:58 UTC