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On 6/19/15, 14:26, "Kevin L. Mitchell" <kevin.mitchell at rackspace.com>
wrote:

>On Fri, 2015-06-19 at 10:07 +0100, Chris Dent wrote:
>> * Are there additional relevant pros and cons for the two proposals?
>> * Are there additional proposals which can address the shortcomings
>>    in either?
>
>On the latter question, would using the If-Modified-Since header[1] make
>any sense as a possible solution?  That at least would be a standard
>HTTP convention for this sort of thing, and tends to match up with the
>semantics of a changes-since query parameter.

First, please use the updated RFC references
(https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7232#section-3.3)

If-Modified-Since does not. That's meant for entire resources. In other
words, let's say you're listing images in Glance and you do

    GET /v2/images

And your response has

    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Last-Modified: some_last_modified_value

In the headers, when you do

    GET /v2/images
    If-Modified-Since: some_last_modified_value

Then you should either get a:

    HTTP/1.1 204 No Content

Or

    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Last-Modified: new_last_modified_value

    (all of the images you saw before)

In other words, If-Modified-Since is meant purely for the state of the
resource. It's main purpose is when used in conjunction with caching.

That said, changes-since is more of a "delta". If you need an analogy,
think of it as an equivalent to

    $ git log 2015.1.0..stable/kilo

It's just the deltas after a certain timestamp.

Cheers,
Ian