: "/solr/select?q=" is a tricky case. Three options: ...there's kind of a chicken/egg problem with this discussion ... the egg being "what should the HTTP response look like in an 'error' situation" the chicken being "what is the internal API to allow a RequestHandler to denote an 'error' situation" ... talking about specific cases only gets us so far since those cases may not be errors in all RequestHandlers.
the problem gets even more complicated when you try to answer the question: what should Solr do if an OutputWriter encounters an error? ... we can't generate a valid JSON response dnoting an error if the JSONOutputWriter is failing :) It might be wise to discuss the API/psuedo code for dealing with errors in RequestHandlers and OutputWriters and then think about what kinds of responses those would generate rather then worrying too much about the exact HTTP status codes first ... a big question to start off with would be: should the RequestHandler know about HTTP satus codes and be allowed to set them explicitly, or should that level of detail be abstracted away? -Hoss
