[Haskell-cafe] Decompressing and http-enumerator

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

On Mon, 2011-08-29 at 13:21 +0200, Gregory Collins wrote:
> A web server should not be setting "Content-encoding: gzip" on a
> .tar.gz file.

Why not? From RFC2616 compliant servers I'd expect a .tar.gz file to
have the Content-* headers provide meta-information about the
content[1], e.g.

 Content-Type: application/x-tar
 Content-Encoding: gzip
 Transfer-Encoding: chunked


If I want to detach the gzip encoding from the "content" (or "entity"),
I'd move it to the Transfer-Encoding header[2], e.g.:

 Content-Type: application/x-tar
 Transfer-Encoding: gzip, chunked





[1]: See RFC2616 sec7.2.1: "Content-Type specifies the media type of the
underlying data. Content-Encoding may be used to indicate any additional
content codings applied to the data, usually for the purpose of data
compression, that are a property of the requested resource."

[2]: See RFC2616 sec4.3: "Transfer-Encoding is a property of the
message, not of the entity, and thus MAY be added or removed by any
application along the request/response chain."