... really more like 1999, but when OpenStack started back in '10 - RFC 2616 was the boss.
Since then (circa '14) we've got 7230 et. al. - a helpful attempt to disambiguate things! Hooray progress! But when someone recently opened this bug I got confused: https://bugs.launchpad.net/swift/+bug/1537811 The wording is 7230 *is* in fact pretty clear - MUST NOT [send a content-length header, zero or otherwise, with a 204 response] - but I really can't find nearly as strong a prescription in 2616. Swift is burdened with a long lived, stable API - which has lead to wide adoption from a large ecosystem of clients that have for better or worse often adopted the practice of expecting the API to behave the way it does even when we might otherwise agree it has a wart here or there. But I'm less worried about the client part - we've handled that plenty of times in the past - ultimately it's a value/risk trade off. Can we fix it without breaking anything - if we do break someone what's the risk of that fallout vs. the value of cleaning it up now (in this particular example RFC 7230 is equally strongly prescriptive of clients, in that we should be able to say "content-length: booberries" in a 204 response and a well behaved client is expected to ignore the header and know that the 204 response is terminated with the first blank line following the headers). Again, we've handled this before and I'm sure we'll make the right choice for our project and broad client base. But I *am* worried about RFC 7230!? Is it reasonable that a HTTP 1.1 compliant server according to 2616 could possibly NOT be a HTTP 1.1 compliant server after 7230? Should the wording of this particular prescription be SHOULD NOT (is that even possible?! I think I read somewhere that RFC's can have revisions; but I always just pretend they're like some sort of divine law which must be followed or face eternal scorn from your fellow engineers) Maybe sending a "content-length: 0" header with a 204 response was *never* tolerable (despite being descriptive and innocuous), but you just couldn't tell you weren't conforming because of all the reasons 7230 got drafted in the first place!? Does anyone know how to get ahold of Mark Nottingham so he can explain to me how all this works? -Clay
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