Re: Bug#391290: apache should automatically detect extra periods/commas at the end of URLs and fix

[Stefan Fritsch <sf@sfritsch.de>]

On Friday 06 October 2006 00:32, Jason Spiro wrote:
> > This can be done with mod_speling or with something like
> >
> > RewriteRule ^(.*)[,.]$ $1 [R]
> >
> > though the latter will prevent you from requesting any file
> > ending with period or comma. With some more refined rewrite magic
> > using subrequests, you can probably avoid that.
> >
> > However, by default Apache should return exactly what was
> > requested. Therefore I close this bug.
>
> Why shouldn't Apache ship with a RewriteRule to correct such a
> common error by default? It's very uncommon for webmasters to post
> files whose names end with a period or comma anyway.

Several reasons:
- if you don't know that the rule is active, it would lead to quite 
unexpected and hard to debug behaviour (who knows what kind of URLs 
are used by some webapp...)
- you don't want to have mod_rewrite active by default (there have
been security issues that only affect mod_rewrite)
- mod_speling does quite a bit more, so you don't want to have that 
active by default either

Cheers,
Stefan