mainSavannah Administration - Support: sr #107737, HTTP headers lack...

 
 

sr #107737: HTTP headers lack "last-modified"

Submitter:  Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn>
Submitted:  Fri 08 Jul 2011 06:30:49 AM UTC
   
 
Category:  Source code repositories - web browsing Priority:  5 - Normal
Severity:  4 - Important Status:  None
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  None
Operating System:  None Open/Closed:  Closed
* Mandatory Fields

Add a New Comment Rich Markup
   

Jump to the original submission

Thu 01 Sep 2011 04:59:14 PM UTC, comment #9: 

I just noticed the SSILastModified option:

 http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_include.html#ssilastmodified

We could switch it on, but soon or later someone *will complain for some surprising / unwanted behavior.

Bernie Innocenti <codewiz>
Thu 01 Sep 2011 04:52:09 PM UTC, comment #8: 

On www.gnu.org, all files with extension .html and .shtml are subject to SSI processing.

Apache does not send the Last-Modified header because it simply can't: some of the content could be dynamically generated, and there's no way to tell until after parsing the page.

Switching all dynamic pages to the .shtml extension is unfeasible, there are just too many of them.

We could workaround this problem by renaming the static pages to a different extension, such as .htm. Regardless of the extension, anything that matches Apache's mime magic rules will be sent as text/html:

  1. string/cB \<!DOCTYPE\ html  text/html
  2. string/cb \<head  text/html
  3. string/cb \<title text/html
  4.       string/bc \<html  text/html
  5. string    \<!-- text/html
  6. string/c  \<h1  text/html


Bernie Innocenti <codewiz>
Sun 31 Jul 2011 08:06:19 PM UTC, comment #7: 

More precisely, the server expands the value, but it is not RFC 1123 compliant, so w3m (which is apparently more picky) does not recognize it, but iceweasel does.

got:   Sunday, 31-Jul-2011 14:46:34 EDT
want:  Sun, 31 Jul 2011 18:46:34 GMT

Can the server be configured that way, please?  (It is possible to configure every page, according to:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/ssi.html#whenwasthisdocumentmodified

but probably it's better to do that on the server.)  Actually, i would be most happy if the server didn't bother doing any SSI processing at all and simply used the file's mtime to compute a proper (RFC 1123) Last-Modified header.  That saves cycles, too.

Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn>
Sun 31 Jul 2011 06:50:35 PM UTC, comment #6: 

I just tried that.  No success.

Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn>
Sun 31 Jul 2011 06:17:30 PM UTC, comment #5: 

No, it is entirely literal.

Karl Berry <karl>
Site Administrator
Sun 31 Jul 2011 02:43:23 PM UTC, comment #4: 

Hi Karl,

I don't understand that fragment, brief as it is.  Is the upcased var a metavariable?  (Would i need to replace that with real data?)

I am cc'ing sysadmin, as suggested by mjflick.

Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn>
Sun 31 Jul 2011 01:06:02 PM UTC, comment #3: 

This would be a question for sysadmin@gnu.org, since they control the www.gnu.org/www.nongnu.org websever.

Michael J. Flickinger <mjflick>
Fri 08 Jul 2011 11:21:44 PM UTC, comment #2: 

actually ... does this work for guile-www?
<meta name="last-modified"
      content="<!--#echo var='LAST_MODIFIED' -->">

Karl Berry <karl>
Site Administrator
Fri 08 Jul 2011 10:52:40 PM UTC, comment #1: 

I can't think of any way you can introduce the Last-Modified: hdr yourself, but neither do I know any specific reason it is not enabled by default for nongnu.org.

Anyone?

Karl Berry <karl>
Site Administrator
Fri 08 Jul 2011 06:30:49 AM UTC, original submission:  

Apparently, the webserver does not include a "last-modified" header, which is a shame, because that can be used (either by conditional-GET or HEAD request) to reduce traffic.  Is there a good reason this header is omitted?

I'm thinking in particular of the page:


Related questions: Is this something each project can/must configure for itself?  (How would i go about doing that?)


Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn>

 

(Note: upload size limit is set to 16384 kB, after insertion of the required escape characters.)

Attach Files:
   
   
Comment:
   

No files currently attached

 

Depends on the following items: None found

Items that depend on this one: None found

 

Carbon-Copy List
  • -email is unavailable- added by codewiz (Posted a comment)
  • -email is unavailable- added by ttn ((CC suggested by mjflick; please let me know if there is a better place.))
  • -email is unavailable- added by mjflick (Posted a comment)
  • -email is unavailable- added by karl (Posted a comment)
  • -email is unavailable- added by ttn (Submitted the item)
  •  

    There are 0 votes so far. Votes easily highlight which items people would like to see resolved in priority, independently of the priority of the item set by tracker managers.

    Only logged-in users can vote.

     

    Follows 1 latest change.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2011-07-31 ttn Carbon-Copy- Added -email is unavailable-

    Back to the top

    Powered by Savane 3.13-aa77.
    Corresponding source code