Subject: [ rtspspec-Bugs-461083 ] Body w/o Content-Length clarification

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 18:50:48 -0700

Bugs item #461083, was opened at 2001-09-12 18:50
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Category: General
Group: Fix for Draft Standard
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Submitted By: Jason Lango (jasonlango)
Assigned to: Rob Lanphier (robla)
Summary: Body w/o Content-Length clarification

Initial Comment:
RFC 2326 says: 

4.4 Message Length

   When a message body is included with a message, the
length of that body is determined by one of the
following (in order of precedence):
 
   1.     Any response message which MUST NOT include a
message body
          (such as the 1xx, 204, and 304 responses) is
always terminated
          by the first empty line after the header
fields, regardless of
          the entity-header fields present in the
message. (Note: An
          empty line consists of only CRLF.)

   2.     If a Content-Length header field (section
12.14) is present,
          its value in bytes represents the length of
the message-body.
          If this header field is not present, a value
of zero is
          assumed.
 
   3.     By the server closing the connection.
(Closing the connection
          cannot be used to indicate the end of a
request body, since
          that would leave no possibility for the
server to send back a
          response.)
 
.. so it is saying that closing the connection is Ok to
indicate the length.

.. but then in section 12.14, it also says that the
Content-Length header MUST be sent.

The two sections should probably be made consistent.

Currently a popular RTSP server implementation (QTSS)
sends
"Connection: Close" followed by a message body for
certain
RTSP error status responses.

It might be worth requiring 'Connection: Close' in item
3 of
section 4.4 to reduce the ambiguity of whether or not a
compatible implementation may expect a response to
contain
a message body.

Alternatively it might be worth -not- saying that
message length
may be determined by the server closing the connection.

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