[Haskell-cafe] Decompressing and http-enumerator

[Gregory Collins]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 4:28 PM, Herbert Valerio Riedel <hvr at gnu.org> wrote:
> 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

The way I would interpret this is: this MIME body is a TAR file which
has been gzip-encoded for the purpose of efficiency in transmission.
When I ask the library for the body contents as an octet stream, I
would expect to get the TAR file contents, uncompressed. This is how
it works when you send text/html with "Content-Encoding: gzip", I
don't understand why it should be different with a .tar.gz file.

If you wanted the MIME body to be passed through unmolested (i.e. you
expect the octet stream to actually be in gzip-compressed TAR format),
I would expect that you set "Content-Type: application/x-tgz" without
a Content-Encoding. But that's just my interpretation both of standard
practice and of the spec.


> 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

As Michael mentioned, that isn't how those headers are interpreted.

G
-- 
Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net>