Comment 41 for bug 336866

I know of two new bug fields that change behind-the-scenes automatically, bug_heat and task_age. task_age is going away, so let's ignore that. I'd like to fix bug_heat and then see if there's a separate problem to do with named operations.

Here's a paste of a message I posted to launchpad-dev about solving the bug_heat problem. I'm still working on this.

1. If a field is important enough to include in the representation, it's
important enough to include in the ETag. As Robert points out, omitting
a read-only field from the ETag will stop clients from knowing when the
value changes.

2. I like Bjorn's idea of a two-part ETag, where both parts are checked
for GET requests/caching, but only one part is checked for PATCH/PUT
requests. But, I don't think this would comply with the HTTP standard.

There are two types of ETags, "strong" and "weak". A strong ETag changes
whenever "the entity (the entity-body or any entity-headers) changes in
any way". A weak ETag changes "only on semantically significant changes,
and not when insignificant aspects of the entity change". These quotes
are from section 13.3.3.

Consider a two-part ETag, where one part describes the state of the
read-only fields and the other part describes the state of the
read-write fields. Taken together, the whole thing is a strong ETag.
Look at only the second part and you have a weak ETag.

But (13.3.3 again) "The only function that the HTTP/1.1 protocol defines
on [ETags] is comparison." There's no looking at the second half of an
ETag. The whole thing has to match.

OK, so let's define another function on ETags, another "weak comparison
function" which only looks at the second half of the ETag. That goes
beyond HTTP/1.1 but it doesn't contradict the standard. Now:

We would like to validate GET requests using the strong comparison
function (looking at the strong ETag), so that even minor changes will
invalidate the cache and the client will always have the most up-to-date
information. We would like to validate PATCH requests by using the weak
comparison function, so that irrelevant changes to the resource don't
affect the success of the PATCH.

But, the HTTP standard says we have to do the opposite. Section 14.26
says "The weak comparison function can only be used with GET or HEAD
requests."

The IETF draft that defines PATCH says, "Clients wishing to apply a
patch document to a known entity can first acquire the strong ETag of
the resource to be modified, and use that Etag in the If-Match header on
the PATCH request to verify that the resource is still unchanged."

As I read the standards, if bug_heat has changed and I try to PATCH an
unrelated field, the correct behavior is that my PATCH should fail. I
don't think this makes sense for us given the way we implement PATCH,
but it does make sense in general.

I don't think anything bad will happen if we implement the two-part
ETag. The whole ETag string is in fact a strong ETag, so anything that
treats it as a strong ETag will still work. We'll just have some
server-side magic that secretly implements a weak comparison function to
make PATCH requests work. And if anyone actually tries to PATCH bug_heat
they'll still get an error.

I'd like to hear other peoples' readings of the standards, especially
Robert's.