Neil,

Ok, I've been reading through section 13 (13.2 specifically) of RFC 2616,
and I think we're OK, (and justified) in allowing the developer of a Quixote
application to specify the Expires header of a StaticFile or
StaticDirectory.  Perhaps the option to set the Expires header on
StaticDirectory(s) is not so good ("... as long as the server's expiration
times are carefully chosen," per 13.2.1), but it does at least offer a finer
grained control mechanism than the Quixote Response object's default of
"-1."

Was there something in particular about the approach I took in addressing
this that you aren't comfortable with?  Existing code, perhaps, or some
other short-sighted glitch on my end?  If so, let me know, and I'll revisit
my modification.

Short of that, I think the ability to easily enable caching to function as
intended is only a benefit for Quixote users and developers.  Especially
where applications with lots of images (or other 'StaticFiles') are
concerned.

Jason Sibre

-----Original Message-----
From: Neil Schemenauer [mailto:nascheme@mems-exchange.org]On Behalf Of
Neil Schemenauer
Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2003 3:46 PM
To: Jason Sibre
Cc: quixote-users@mems-exchange.org
Subject: Re: [Quixote-users] Augmenting StaticFile to use "Expires:"


On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 07:21:19PM -0500, Jason Sibre wrote:
> I think this cleans things up nicely.  cache_time now defaults to None,
and
> unless I did something silly, this will produce identical behavior (with
> regard to the Expires header) to an un-patched util.py.  I also fixed that
> oversight about directories within directories (Thanks again for pointing
> that out!)
>
> As before, I have two patches to submit, one for util.py files that are
> 'stock' 0.6 release versions, which include both Graham's IMS support and
my
> Expires support, and another that will patch a util.py that has already
been
> patched for IMS support to include Expires support.

Hi Jason,

I think supporting the If-Modified-Since header would be a good idea.
However, we need to be careful about being compliant with the HTTP 1.1
specification.  We are probably not right now but we should be and I
don't want to make things worse.  I'm not saying there is something
specifically wrong with your patch, I'm just being cautious.

I would prefer to only support exact matches for the If-Modified-Since
header.  That makes the code simpiler and more robust.  User agents are
not supposed to mangle the Last-Modified date.  Does anyone have an
objection to only supporting exact matches?

Adding a Last-Modified header when serving static files is definitely a
good idea.  I think that should probably be enabled by default.

  Neil