[Haskell-cafe] Decompressing and http-enumerator

[Michael Snoyman]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 2:21 PM, Gregory Collins
<greg at gregorycollins.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 10:08 AM, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Erik just opened an issue on Github[1] that affected me very recently
>> as well when writing some automated Hackage checking code[2]. The
>> issue is that http-enumerator sees the content-encoding header and
>> decompresses the tarball, returning an uncompressed tarfile. I can
>> avoid this with rawBody = False, but that's not a real solution, since
>> that also disables chunked response handling.
>
> A web server should not be setting "Content-encoding: gzip" on a
> .tar.gz file. I agree that http-enumerator is correctly following the
> spec by decompressing.
>
> If you decide to implement a workaround for this, the only reasonable
> thing I can think of is adding a "ignoreContentEncoding" knob the user
> can twiddle to violate spec.

I'm wondering what the most appropriate way to handle this is. Maybe a
dontDecompress record, looking like:

    type ContentType = ByteString
    dontDecompress :: ContentType -> Bool

Then browser behavior would be:

    browserDecompress = (== "application/x-tar")

and current behavior would be:

    defaultDecompress = const False

I don't have any strong opinions here...

Michael