support for gzip/deflate compression of fetched metadata

[Tom Scavo]

On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 3:50 PM, Cantor, Scott <cantor.2 at osu.edu> wrote:
> On 8/21/11 3:32 PM, "Tom Scavo" <trscavo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>Okay, so SP 2.4 (and later) supports HTTP compression. What exactly is
>>the value of the Accept-Encoding header?
>
> I have no idea, whatever libcurl sets it to.

Hmm, then how do you know it supports "gzip/deflate compression" as
stated on the NativeSPInterestingFeatures wiki page?

> Try it and see, just set the
> logging level to DEBUG for the libcurl category.

That would be difficult for me right now.

>>Does the SP support conditional GET? (I can't find this the answer to
>>this question in the documentation.)
>
> https://wiki.shibboleth.net/confluence/display/SHIB2/NativeSPInterestingFeatures

You usually encourage comments re the documentation, so here goes:

NativeSPInterestingFeatures isn't where I expect to find definitive
documentation regarding metadata refresh. Even so, what's written on
that page ("configuration files...support HTTP caching and
gzip/deflate compression") doesn't tell me what I need to know:

- Does the SP support HTTP compression? If so, what is the precise
value of the Accept-Encoding header? (As a federation operator, this
suggests what I should be supporting on the server.)

- Does the SP support HTTP conditional GET? If so, does it support the
Last-Modified and/or ETag response headers? (If it supports the
latter, I assume that means it supports the If-None-Match request
header.)

I'm not sure what wiki pages this stuff belongs on (maybe
NativeSPMetadataProvider or NativeSPReloadableXMLFile) but I'd be
happy to help document it once I know the answers.

Thanks,
Tom