Re: [PATCH] http-backend: give a hint that web browser access is not supported

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Dec 5, 2021, 20:13 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq7dcilsig.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <34pqs81o-36p6-s416-s791-1onsqo1734oo@vanv.qr>

Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@inai.de> writes:

Show 15 quoted lines

>>Also, will the real Git clients, which are the primary intended
>>audiences this program is trying to talk to, be OK if we suddenly
>>start giving a non-empty 404 page?
>
> I am confident enough to say yes. It's not like git-http-backend
> returned anything previously in the 404 case (like JSON or so),
> therefore clients could not possibly depend on content.
>
>>If any implementations of Git HTTP client this program is serving
>>(1) uses a 404 response as a cue to decide its next request
>>(e.g. there may be some "try this URL and if it fails, do another
>>one" fallback logic)
>
> Not sure if they heed Location: headers, but I am not changing
> that :-)

I was more worried about clients barfing because they depend on *not* having content. They parse the status (404) out, and then leave the message part untouched---they may not even read the message in full, and that did not matter because there wasn't anything to read and discard. Now we are sending more.

As long as the leftover bytes would not cause problem with the action they take after that step, we would be OK.