Re: More detailed error message for 403 forbidden.

On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 12:11:55PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

One problem is that the content body sent along with the error is not
necessarily appropriate for showing to the user (e.g., if it is HTML, it
is probably not a good idea to show it on the terminal). So I think we
would want to only show it when the server has indicated via the
content-type that the message is meant to be shown to the user. I'm
thinking the server would generate something like:

   HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
   Content-type: application/x-git-error-message

   User 'me' does not have enough permission to access the repository.

which would produce the example you showed above.

Actually, isn't the human-readable part of the server response meant
for this kind of thing?  I.e.

	HTTP/1.1 403 User 'me' not allowed to accept the repository.

In theory, yes. But I don't think that most servers make it very easy to
use custom "reason phrases" (that is the rfc 2616 term for them). At
least I could not easily figure out how to make Apache do so. You can do
so from CGIs, but I think you'd want to customize some of this at the
HTTP server level (e.g., overriding 404s with a custom message). There's
much better support at that level for custom error documents (e.g.,
Apache's ErrorDocument).

I do not configure http servers very often, though, so I could be wrong
about what is normal practice, and what is easy to do.

-Peff