A quick look at the error logs on apache.org shows almost 500 "No Acceptable Variant" errors so far today. Many of these errors are caused by people with misconfigured browsers trying to deal with our new language-negotiated manual. (I am defining "misconfigured" as not including "en" for english in their browser language preferences, although that is an admittedly english-centric view of things.)
We discussed this once before, and concluded that there was nothing we could do about. However, I now believe that this is not true. If there is a file with with no language attribute associated with it, then Apache will serve that file in preference to the "No Acceptable Variant" error. So, for example, if we include a page called "index.html.html", then since this page has no language, it will be served as a "default" page. So, I see three options: 1. Leave things as they are and hope that people with misconfigured browsers fix them. 2. Put a page in index.html.html describing how to configure content negotiation (as in http://www.debian.org/intro/cn) 3. Just symlink (can that be done in cvs?) index.html.html to index.html.en to make english the default page. This could be done for every page where we add a translation. I am leaning towards 3, but would like input on how this could be done in cvs. In the future, as we get more translations, we should also do something more akin to the Debian model where each page lists all the translations available and a link to a "language help page". Opinions? Joshua.
