[7927] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Common Log format
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roy T. Fielding)
Fri Apr 14 05:03:40 1995
Date: Fri, 14 Apr 1995 04:50:40 +0500
Errors-To: procmaster@www19.w3.org
Reply-To: fielding@avron.ics.uci.edu
From: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@avron.ics.uci.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www10.w3.org>
> I have a serious problem with the Common Logfile format, as presented at
> <URL:http://w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Daemon/User/Config/Logging.html#
> common-logfile-format>. It indicates that the "request" portion of the
> log entry should be:
>
> The request line exactly as it came from the client.
Yes -- that is what a log is for.
> Unfortunately with directory indexing, this means that three different
> requests all have the same semantic meaning:
>
> GET /dirname
> GET /dirname/
> GET /dirname/index.html
>
> (Assuming that index.html is the dir index file, this too can vary.) Are
> the current logfile processing programs taking this vagarity into
> account?
Yes, it is a trivial thing to do -- wwwstat has done it since v0.1.
> I intend to log
>
> GET /dirname/index.html
>
> in all cases where index.html existed, and
>
> GET /dirname/
>
> in all cases where it doesn't, unless somebody can provide me with a
> really good reason not to.
Reason: it would by lying -- that is not the request it got, so it shouldn't
be logging it as if it was. For instance, I am usually interested in cases
where there are a large number of requests for
GET /dirname
since that usually means somebody has advertized (or included as a link)
the wrong URL for that dirname. Your scheme would prevent me from finding
those cases in the logfile.
> One of the features of the server I am
> writing will be reliable logging, so this is a little more important than
> it might sound.
In that case, don't do it -- you just introduced an unreliability.
If the server mucks with the request, I can't rely on it for maintenance
and security checks.
....Roy T. Fielding Department of ICS, University of California, Irvine USA
<fielding@ics.uci.edu>
<URL:http://www.ics.uci.edu/dir/grad/Software/fielding>
