On 24.07.2009, at 14:37, Benoit Chesneau wrote:
Reading the spec and with feedback from cmlenz on irc, I'm changing
my position for GET :)
If content-length is know, I think CouchDB should send unchunked until
the client don't ask for specific encoding with TE in headers and http
version is 1.1 :
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.39
(Background: the one thing chunked encoding gives you over "identity"
encoding with a Content-Length header is that you can detect some kind
of data corruptions before having consumed the entire response. Benoit
noted that this was important to him.)
I can't really figure out a nice way to have the client request
chunked encoding. "TE: chunked; q=1" is implicit in HTTP/1.1, so how
would a client say: "really, I'd prefer chunked encoding"?
We *could* have CouchDB use chunked encoding for attachments GETs only
when "TE: chunked" is specified, but that'd be a proprietary hack,
AFAICT.
There's also "TE: trailers" to indicate that the client supports
trailers in chunked responses. We could base the decision on that
header, but that'd be just as much of a hack IMO.
Maybe a query string parameter really is the way to go here?
Cheers,
--
Christopher Lenz
cmlenz at gmx.de
http://www.cmlenz.net/
