RFC 2616 distinguishes between content codings (section 3.5) and
transport codings (section 3.6). Content coding is out of scope,
as Oleg mentioned. HttpClient will not automatically decompress
for example a gzipped tar into a plain tar archive.

Transport coding is in scope for HttpClient/HttpComponents, as we
already support "chunked". We can consider adding support for other
transport codings, such as "gzip". The pluggable filter architecture
of HttpComponents will at least allow you to add your own support
for transport codings. I guess that seamless interoperability of
the HttpComponents "chunked" implementation with additional custom
transport encodings will be made possible on request.
I don't think we'll find time to add new transport codings out of
the box in HttpClient nor HttpComponents. Which implies that the
interaction of chunked with other transport codings will not be
tested until somebody tries to do it. It is a tricky thing, since
the response filter chain will have to depend on the value of the
Transfer-Encoding response header. Given the complexity of the task,
I see this item dangling near the end of the to-do list forever.
As always, contributions will be welcome.

If somebody should contribute code that performs decompression for
transport codings, we sure won't stop you from re-using that code
for decompression of content codings. But that will remain the
responsibility of the application using HttpComponents.

cheers,
  Roland

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