The apache config documented in po has a subtle bug. It works until a site gets an index.atom or index.rss file. (Acutally, with po enabled, they're called index.en.atom or index.en.rss etc, but the result is the same).

Then, when wget, curl, or w3m is pointed at http://site/, apache serves up the rss/atom file rather than the index page.

Analysis:

• /etc/mime.types gives mime types to .rss and .atom files
• mod_negotiation's MultiViews allows any file with a mime type to be served up via content negotiation, if the client requests that type.
• wget etc send Accept: */* to accept all content types. Compare with firefox, which sends Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*
• So apache has a tie between a html encoded Enlish file, and a rss encoded English file and the client has no preference. In a tie, apache will serve up the smallest file, which tends to be the rss file. (Apache's docs say it uses that strange criteria to break ties; see http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_mime.html#multiviewsmatch)

The only way I have found to work around this problem is to remove atom and rss from /etc/mime.types. Of course, that has other undesirable results.

I wonder if it would be worth making the po plugin generate apache type map files. That should avoid this problem. --Joey

Update: A non-intrusive fix is to add this to apache configuration. This tunes the "quality" of the rss and atom files, in an apparently currently undocumented way (though someone on #httpd suggested it should get documented). Result is that apache will prefer serving index.html. --Joey done

AddType application/rss+xml;qs=0.8 .rss
AddType application/atom+xml;qs=0.8 .atom