On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 10:37, Senthil Kumaran <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
> Now, what happens when you type "http://bugs.python.org?10231" [1] in
> your browser? According to this bug report, the server should 301
> redirect it to "http://bugs.python.org/?10231". If you try this, this
> does not happen. The browser (client) is in fact, changing it to the
> corrected URL (because the original is invalid) and the server is just
> ignoring the so called query portion).

I see your point now, but I don't agree with it completely. It seems
reasonable to allow query parameters to specify things like sort order
for a directory listing or have a fragment to focus the browser on a
particular entry. On the other hand, if we don't want to support the
redirect with a fragment or query parameters, we should instead return
a 400 response. I can't see any situation in which redirecting
"/something?foo" to "/something?foo/" is the correct behaviour.

> If you use, urllib2 to request the above [1], you will find that it
> will fail with 401 error.

A 401 is "Unauthorized", which means the server is asking for
authentication -- I don't think that's relevant here.