1.3.26: Content-Length header too strict now

[David Burry <db...@tagnet.org>]

Hi!

I'm having a problem since upgrading from Apache 1.3.23 to 1.3.26.  It appears that the "Content-Length" header field is much more strict in what it will accept from http clients than it was before, and this is causing me biiig problems.

A certain http client (which shall remain nameless due to embarrassment) is generating a request header like this:

GET /some/file HTTP/1.0
Host: some.place.com
Content-Type:
Last-Modified:
Accept: */*
User-Agent: foo
Content-Length:

Technically this is a very big no-no to have some blank header fields like this, I know.  Content-Length, for instance, should either specify 0 (zero) or not be listed there at all.  But the client is already out there in millions of users' hands, embedded into several popular products (as part of an auto-update sort of mechanism)...... so.... ideally, what I'd like to have, is an environment variable flag that disables some of the strictness of the Content-Length header field checking, to allow this aberrant behavior in some cases without producing errors.  Perhaps this can be made part of Apache 1.3.27?

Please let me know what you all think of this idea.

Dave