Redirection doesn't always work (5.1b)

I finally attempted to upgrade my application from libwww-5.0a into
libwww-5.1b, and after fighting over the usual undocumented API
changes, the first quick tests revealed that the redirection doesn't
always work, an example is

	w3c http://www.vtt.fi/tte/staff/msa/lepidoptera/intro.html

..or redirection does work, but the application goes into loop of
retrieving the redirected target document forever. My *GUESS* about
the probable sequece of events is

1) The redirected target is a cgi-bin script that doesn't generate
   Content-Length header (most of the cgi-bin scripts won't do this)

2) For some reason, when a wwwlib is fetching a document as a
   redirection, missing content-length is poison. It thinks the read
   fails and retries forver?

   *NOTE* Retrieving the *SAME* target directly works just fine. The
   library has no trouble with the missing content-length!


Redirect reply to the first request
	HTTP/1.0 302 Found
	Server: Netscape-Enterprise/2.01
	Date: Wed, 08 Oct 1997 07:09:08 GMT
	Location: http://www.vtt.fi/tte/cgi-bin/lepidoptera/intro.html
	Content-type: text/html
	Content-length: 238

Headers from the redirected target (no content-length)
	HTTP/1.0 200 OK
	Server: Netscape-Enterprise/2.01
	Date: Wed, 08 Oct 1997 07:44:03 GMT
	Content-type: text/html

This problem has possibly been already discussed in www-lib-bugs in
different forms, but nobody has produced a fix yet?

	Re: w3c, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen 
	http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-lib-bugs/msg00255.html

	BUG: temporary redirection fails under l, Chris Pallotta
	http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-lib-bugs/msg00261.html

...and why the loop never terminates?
	Re: bug in HTHost_decreaseRetry ???, Gustaf Neumann
	http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-lib-bugs/msg00267.html

-- 
Markku Savela (msa@hemuli.tte.vtt.fi), Technical Research Centre of Finland
Multimedia Systems, P.O.Box 1203,FIN-02044 VTT,http://www.vtt.fi/tte/staff/msa/

Received on Wednesday, 8 October 1997 06:36:15 UTC