Bug#988979: libwww-perl: Peculiar 308 Permanent redirect causes LWP::UserAgent to return an error

[Dominic Sweetman]

Package: libwww-perl
Version: 6.36-2
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,


I'm using LWP::UserAgent to fetch json information: the page
https://www.radiotimes.com/film/g6j5ty/well-meet-again is showing the failure
today.

This results in a "308 Permanent redirect".  Using wget suggests that the
redirect is just the original URL with a '/' at the end.

But LWP::UserAgent returns with is_success false, and the response request->uri
method returns the original URL without the '/'.

A hack of detecting the combination of status 308 and an unchanged URL and
manually attaching a '/' has got it working again, but hardly seems correct.

It would seem more consistent with the way LWP::UserAgent handles redirects to
perform the redirect, while reporting the redirect target correctly through the
response request->uri method.




-- System Information:
Debian Release: 10.8
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-14-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_GB.utf8), LANGUAGE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_GB.utf8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages libwww-perl depends on:
ii  ca-certificates             20200601~deb10u2
ii  libencode-locale-perl       1.05-1
ii  libfile-listing-perl        6.04-1
ii  libhtml-parser-perl         3.72-3+b3
ii  libhtml-tagset-perl         3.20-3
ii  libhtml-tree-perl           5.07-2
ii  libhttp-cookies-perl        6.04-1
ii  libhttp-date-perl           6.02-1
ii  libhttp-message-perl        6.18-1
ii  libhttp-negotiate-perl      6.01-1
ii  liblwp-mediatypes-perl      6.02-1
ii  liblwp-protocol-https-perl  6.07-2
ii  libnet-http-perl            6.18-1
ii  libtry-tiny-perl            0.30-1
ii  liburi-perl                 1.76-1
ii  libwww-robotrules-perl      6.02-1
ii  netbase                     5.6
ii  perl                        5.28.1-6+deb10u1

Versions of packages libwww-perl recommends:
ii  libdata-dump-perl    1.23-1
ii  libhtml-form-perl    6.03-1
ii  libhtml-format-perl  2.12-1
ii  libhttp-daemon-perl  6.01-3
ii  libmailtools-perl    2.18-1

Versions of packages libwww-perl suggests:
pn  libauthen-ntlm-perl  <none>

-- no debconf information