proposal part 1 - VCL: edit header tokens/entities

[Leif Pedersen]

On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 1:33 AM, Geoff Simmons <geoff at uplex.de> wrote:

>
> I'm not a big fan of:
>
> > Accept: text/plain; q=0.5, text/x-dvi, */*
> >
> > set req.http.Accept."text/plain"."q" = 3.14;
> >
> > -> Accept: text/plain; q=3.14, text/x-dvi, */*
>
> I had to look at that several times to realize what's going on -- the
> operation adds 'text/plain; q=3.14' to a comma-separated list. At
> first glance it looked like the set operation was doing two things at
> once, adding both 'text/plain', which is not set to anything, and 'q',
> which is set to the right-hand side.
>
> You'd think it should actually be (my notation suggestion this time):
>
> set req.http.Accept["text/plain; q"] = 3.14:
>
>
Just as a long-time user of Varnish, this caught my eye. I've worked around
this missing feature many times. Thank you for considering it.

I actually found the original proposal far more intuitive. Not only did I
immediately understand its intent, but it's clearer that VCL understands
the header's hierarchy intelligently. True, it'll automatically add
text/plain if missing for the purpose of setting q, but that's not uncommon
in other languages, nor is it ambiguous (what else could it reasonably
mean?). The counter-proposal looks to me like VCL does not understand the
semicolon. It's not clear that setting "text/plain; e" = 2.718 will result
in "text/plain; q=3.14; e=2.718" rather than "text/plain; q=3.14,
text/plain; e=2.718". (I'm fairly sure the former is right, but I admit
that a glance at RFC 2616 didn't clarify.) Nor is it clear that removing
text/plain will remove text/plain with a q-value, or that assigning
"text/plain; q" will replace "text/plain". I'd likely leave extra code in
my VCL to be sure, such as removing "text/plain; q" before setting
"text/plain". I'd wind up spending a lot of time checking these edge cases
to be sure Varnish handles it properly, whereas the original proposal
wouldn't provoke my skepticism.



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