Received: (qmail 87327 invoked by uid 501); 28 Feb 2002 23:37:05 -0000
Message-Id: <20020228233705.87326.qmail@apache.org>
Date: 28 Feb 2002 23:37:05 -0000
From: Martijn de Vries <martijn@shop.com>
Reply-To: martijn@shop.com
To: submit@bugz.apache.org
Subject: DefaultLanguage when unknown language is requested
X-Send-Pr-Version: 3.110

>Number:         9996
>Category:       mod_negotiation
>Synopsis:       DefaultLanguage when unknown language is requested
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    apache
>State:          closed
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          change-request
>Submitter-Id:   apache
>Arrival-Date:   Thu Feb 28 15:40:00 PST 2002
>Closed-Date:    Fri Mar 01 09:45:24 PST 2002
>Last-Modified:  Fri Mar 01 09:45:24 PST 2002
>Originator:     martijn@shop.com
>Release:        1.3.23
>Organization:
>Environment:
N/A
>Description:
When a client requests documents in a language that has not been specified in Apache using AddLanguage (e.g. en-us is not specified by default), currently a 
document with an unknown language extension is returned.

We have an index.html for several languages including index.html.tr (turkish). By default Apache does not have AddLanguage statements for 'en-us' and 'tr'. Now if a client connects and asks for an index.html in 'en-us' (or any other unknown language), Apache looks at the index.html.* and returns the first (?) index.html.XX it can find where XX is an unknown language (e.g. tr).

It would be much nicer if the DefaultLanguage statement would take effect also if the language requested is unknown. Currently it only works when no specific language is requested by the client.

We had the situation where every client requesting documents in an unknown language (e.g. en-us) would receive the index.html.tr file. By default the .tr extension has the application/troff mime-type associated with it. As one can imagine this caused a lot of problems.
>How-To-Repeat:

>Fix:

>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
State-Changed-From-To: open-closed
State-Changed-By: slive
State-Changed-When: Fri Mar  1 09:45:24 PST 2002
State-Changed-Why:

Yes, this is a kind of freaky area, but you aren't
seeing a bug.  This is expected behavior.  Some 
details are at
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/lang-neg.html

In Apache 2.0, there is a new ForceLanguagePriority
directive that does exactly what you want.

Thanks for using Apache.
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