[Pkg-erlang-devel] Bug#600169: Info received (couchdb missing WWW-Authentication HTTP header)

[Jason Woofenden]

Well, what do you know, they're shipping broken HTTP on purpose,
and there's a config option to actually follow the RFC and not
break all known browsers and most libraries...

To fix add these two lines to
/etc/xdg/desktop-couch/compulsory-auth.ini

[httpd]
WWW-Authenticate = Basic realm="administrator"

And then desktop-couch's futon works! (after a restart)

The couchdb default config (/etc/couchdb/local.ini) seems to have
this already, but commented out.

Apparently the devs left this off to avoid unsightly dialog boxes,
but what I think they don't realize, is that it also makes the
supplied credentials in the URL not work (because the browsers have
no way of knowing to use Basic instead of say Digest
authentication). And thus it's impossible to authenticate, except
with really geeky programs like curl (and wget if you sift through
the manpage very carefully) that let you specify the authentication
encoding method.

I hope you all will update the couchdb and desktopcouch packages
with this configuration option even if upstream couchdb insists on
shipping broken HTTP.


Thank you,   - Jason