[Zope-Coders] RFC: Remove funky WebDAV hackery?

[Tres Seaver]

There are at least three places in the Zope2 source tree which make
weird changes to the response object, presumably to support flaky
Borg-ish clients.

  ZServer/HTTPResponse.py -- injects an empty 'Etag:' header, if the
    response hasn't set one explicitly.  This behavior is totally
    unhelpful;  an empty Etag can't be used properly to do *anything*
    that Etags are for;  I am guessing that some client (the way-brokey
    WebFolders, perhaps?) won't do WebDAV unless an Etag is present?

  lib/python/webdav/{Collection,Resource} -- 'dav__init'
    sets a weird, custom header,'MS-Author-Via', to 'DAV';  again, I
    presume this permits some flaky client to work well with the
    object handling the request.

The first change in particular is obnoxious;  some caches may refuse to
cache pages with empty Etags, because they cannot be validated.  The
second change could be less obnoxious if it was only done in the
presence of the broken clients.

Can anyone shed further light on this?

Tres.
-- 
===============================================================
Tres Seaver                                tseaver@zope.com
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