On Tue, 8 May 2007, Luigi Grilli wrote:

> When I try to connect to the server through our company proxy (using -x
> host:port option of curl) I receive correctly all reply from the webserver,
> so NO problems with proxy.

... and I figure that is because the proxy adds at least one header to make
the response fine protocol-wise...

> The problems comes when I direct connect to the webserver. If the webserver
> return a content-length header curl works perfectly. If the server doesn't
> return the content-length curl exit without waiting for the response body.

If there's no content-length header in a HTTP 1.1 response, there are two
other ways to "mark" the end of it: 1) send the response with chunked-encoding
and thus sending the header that says so or 2) close the connection after
the response and thus sending the header that says so.

How is libcurl supposed to know what your server intends to behave?

This "issue" was indeed added because we made libcurl somewhat more strictly
adhering to the HTTP spec, but we also did this because having the opposite
behaviour does indeed cause problems to those who actually assumes or depends
on this kind of behavior!

> Reading some past mails of this list I read the expected behaviour was
> for HTTP1.0 to wait for the webserver to close the connection. This is
> how other clients that works with this webserver get the reply content
> (and expect the server to close the connection).

HTTP 1.1 is persistent by default, so that sounds like a weird assumption
with the lack of such a header.

> I tried also with the --ignore-content-length option but it went event
> worst.

Well, there's no content-length header present to ignoring the absent header
shouldn't do much of a difference...

In my eyes, this is an web server bug. But sure, I realize we live in a world
that is filled with crappy software so there might be reasons for libcurl to
still act fine against such servers. I'm open for suggestions.

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