Feed Reader Scorer

[psa]

• I have read this document: https://miniflux.app/opinionated.html#feature-request

A feed reader verifier is being turned up and it seemed like something you might like to point miniflux at for external verification. Mentioning here in case you weren't yet aware.

Posts about the service spin up:

• https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/
• https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/30/fs/

If you want to see how miniflux fares from a feed server perspective, you can contact Rachel to set it up via: https://rachelbythebay.com/contact/

[setupminimal]

As I happens, I wrote to Rachel asking whether any Miniflux instances had been tested. She said that they were all behaving well, except for the first bug described here: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/06/11/fsr/

Bug: It's entirely possible for a feed's Last-Modified value (seconds) to remain the same while the ETag (length + microseconds on stock Apache) changes. More than a few feed readers assume if they get the same value for Last-Modified, then they don't have to update the cached ETag value. This causes them to effectively make unconditional requests until the feed changes again. Watch out for shortcut evaluations in your caching code!

... which I hope won't be too difficult to fix. I will look into putting a PR together when I get some spare time, but that might not be for a while.

[jvoisin]

Uhuh, I also sent her an email, and got a similar reply:

Miniflux is so close. It just has this one bug that I've seen in a few readers - if the Last-Modified header doesn't change, then it doesn't pick up the change in the ETag header. It'll keep sending the old value in If-None-Match and that makes for an unconditional request.

I should have looked at the bugtracker first.

[jvoisin]

It seems that this behaviour is on purpose though:

// We update caching headers only if the feed has been modified,
// because some websites don't return the same headers when replying with a 304.
originalFeed.EtagHeader = responseHandler.ETag()
originalFeed.LastModifiedHeader = responseHandler.LastModified()