[erlang-patches] Patch for packet_parser.c to Include HTTP Methods Defined in RFC 2518 / WebDAV

[Oscar Hellström]

Hi,

Firstly, I fail to understand why this is an issue that need to be
"fixed"? Except the increased size and a few more CPU cycles when
matching (which should quite small any way) why is it it a problem
having the methods as strings? Personally I wouldn't mind if *all*
methods would have been strings since mixing types makes programming a
bit bloated, but this obviously can't be changed.

Anyway, for the legacy discussion. Looking at the yaws code, your
assumption seems wrong. In handle_extension_method/4 the code assumes
that the extension method is a string, at least in the rather old
version that I looked at. It would certainly be possible to add clause
before the last one such as:
handle_extension_method(Method, CliSock, Req, Head) when is_atom(Methed) ->
    handle_extension_method(atom_to_list(Method), CliSock, Req, Head);
but without this, it looks to me as if yaws would fail.

Jan Lehnardt wrote:
> On 14 Feb 2009, at 14:17, Jan Lehnardt wrote:
>   
>> Good point. I'm not aware of any Erlang WebDAV server
>> but I do not constantly monitor the application space and
>> I'm relatively new to Erlang (2 years now). I certainly have
>> no idea about internal applications that use the WebDAV
>> protocol or use any other non-standard HTTP extensions.
>>     
>
> A little more digging.
>
> YAWS has a WevDAV extension and it uses this code to
> solve the issue:
>
> call_method(Method, CliSock, Req, H) ->
>      case Method of
>          F when atom(F) ->
>              ?MODULE:F(CliSock, Req, H);
>          L when list(L) ->
>              handle_extension_method(L, CliSock, Req, H)
>      end.
>
> (YAWS 1.79 source src/yaws_server.erl line 1155 ff.)
>
> YAWS hence, wouldn't break. Maybe because Klacke
> was smart enough to foresee that this is getting fixed
> eventually :)
>
> --
>
> Erlware includes a WebDAV module and as far as I
> understand*, it does its own http parsing and always
> uses lists / strings, not atoms for methods.
>
> * http://git.erlware.org/web?p=crary_dav.git;a=blob_plain;f=crary_dav/src/crary_dav.erl;hb=HEAD 
>   and
> http://git.erlware.org/web?p=crary.git;a=blob_plain;f=src/crary_sock.erl;hb=HEAD
>
> Cheers,
> Jan
> --
>
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>   


-- 
Oscar Hellström, oscar@REDACTED
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