Bug#578242: www.debian.org: Package information pages never expire (w.r.t. HTTP Time-Stamping) though they obviously should

[Simon Paillard <simon.paillard@resel.enst-bretagne.fr>]

retitle 578242 packages.debian.org: package information pages never expire (w.r.t. HTTP Time-Stamping)

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 10:35:10AM +0200, Markus Ueberall wrote:
> Package: www.debian.org
> Severity: normal
> 
> I'm trying to monitor updates to three 'unstable' packages using trusty
> old "websec" (http://baruch.ev-en.org/proj/websec/) and noticed that the
> http://packages.debian.org/ webserver returns "HTTP/1.1 304 Not
> Modified" responses where it shouldn't as can be seen from the example
> using "wget" below. Is it possible to fix this w/o me having to turn off
> timestamp checking? Thanks in advance!  :) 

Thanks for your report.

Though there is no doubt about the bug itself (the main being it will
affect proxies and web browser caches), note there are better ways to
achieve your goal:
- monitor instead the changelog page :
  http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/non-free/s/sun-java6/current/changelog
- subscribe to the PTS (Packages Tracking System):
  http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sun-java6.html

Note that changelog/copyright pages are not affected, since these html
pages are static.

> wget -O /dev/null --header="If-Modified-Since: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 17:18:19 GMT" http://packages.debian.org/sid/sun-java6-jre
[..]
> 2010-04-18 09:44:14 ERROR 304: Not Modified.

-- 
Simon Paillard