Apache 1.3.4 has come out and they incorporated the patch I sent in to fix a bug in the content negotiation. Unfortunately, more complaints had been sent in regarding problems with www.debian.org (which had the patch applied to 1.3.3) so I suspected there was something else wrong. I finally got around to looking at it and found that I had only fixed half the problem - it wasn't until a few more languages were added that the the other bug happened to show itself.
A patch has been submitted to apache (internal id mod_negotiation/3688) and should show up in the next release. Depending on what happens with yet another problem described below, a patched version of mod_negotiate will be provided for 1.3.3 or 1.3.4 . Before installing 1.3.4, I decided to test it. It appears that there is code in 1.3.4 to support something called 'transparent content negotiation'. It appears to be an improvement/extension on content negotiation(*) that allows the browser to receive feedback from the browser on the available choices and make the final decision itself (this could be automatic or the browser can supply the user with the choices). It appears that the rfc hasn't been finalized so it is unclear how stable the implementation is. The problem is that when I tried using lynx with 1.3.4, I am always presented with the list of choices. This is true even if the preferred language is set to 'en' so that only the english version is valid. This whole thing is eating up more time than I have to devote to it (without neglecting debian) so I'm trying to get others to look into it. To sum up: there are still problems with the content negotiation in apache and I don't recommend people upgrade yet. When I find out whether the problem is with lynx, apache, or my configuration I'll report back. Jay Treacy (*)content negotiation should have been called content selection since there is no actual negotiation going on. The browser simply presents its preferrences and the server then serves the document it deems best.
