Re: [PATCH] http-backend: give a hint that web browser access is not supported

Jan Engelhardt [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Also, will the real Git clients, which are the primary intended
audiences this program is trying to talk to, be OK if we suddenly
start giving a non-empty 404 page?

I am confident enough to say yes. It's not like git-http-backend
returned anything previously in the 404 case (like JSON or so),
therefore clients could not possibly depend on content.

quoted

If any implementations of Git HTTP client this program is serving
(1) uses a 404 response as a cue to decide its next request
(e.g. there may be some "try this URL and if it fails, do another
one" fallback logic)

Not sure if they heed Location: headers, but I am not changing
that :-)

I was more worried about clients barfing because they depend on
*not* having content.  They parse the status (404) out, and then
leave the message part untouched---they may not even read the
message in full, and that did not matter because there wasn't
anything to read and discard.  Now we are sending more.

As long as the leftover bytes would not cause problem with the
action they take after that step, we would be OK.