[Zope] acquisition with HTTP HEAD

[Oliver Bleutgen]

Mark Logan wrote:

 > maybe i'm missing something, but it seems that calling HEAD on a zope
url does not invoke acquisition.
 > [...] This seems wrong since the document appears to be there under
 > one method and appears to not be there in the other.  Is this
 > acceptable in terms of the HTTP RFC?  I haven't checked.


Nope, from the http/1.1 rfc

9.4 HEAD

    The HEAD method is identical to GET except that the server MUST NOT
    return a message-body in the response. The metainformation contained
    in the HTTP headers in response to a HEAD request SHOULD be identical
    to the information sent in response to a GET request. This method can
    be used for obtaining metainformation about the entity implied by the
    request without transferring the entity-body itself. This method is
    often used for testing hypertext links for validity, accessibility,
    and recent modification.

And this should indeed be fixed, because some search engines and monitoring 
tools and even browsers (icab/mac, mozilla) indeed seem to use HEAD for purposes 
stated above. I just grepped one log-file from a server and found various hits 
with HEAD ~180 in november alone.

cheers,
oliver