trac.web.api.Request.send_file: test for modification date and If-Modified-Since header

[Carsten Klein <carsten.klein@…>]

here it reads

        stat = os.stat(path)
        mtime = datetime.fromtimestamp(stat.st_mtime, localtz)
        last_modified = http_date(mtime)
        if last_modified == self.get_header('If-Modified-Since'):
            self.send_response(304)
            self.send_header('Content-Length', 0)
            self.end_headers()
            raise RequestDone

should this not be

        if last_modified <= self.get_header('If-Modified-Since'):

?

[Remy Blank]

It will not make a difference. If the If-Modified-Since header is present, that means the client has already requested the file before. Then you have one of the following cases:

• The file has not been modified, and the times are equal, so we don't want to send the file again.
• The file has been modified, and the client doesn't have the right version. So we want to send the file anyway. In practice, the mtime will always grow, so last_modified will always be greater than the value of the header.

Or in other words: if the header doesn't match the last modification time, the client doesn't have the correct file content, so we want to send it anyway.

[Carsten Klein <carsten.klein@…>]

never thought of it in that way, thanks for the input