[icecast] User Agent string

[Sean /The RIMBoy/]

I'll admit I've not poked around the icecast source, but seeing as I came
across this issue on another server (and subsequently on clients):

How many servers depend on the User Agent field sent by a client?

In looking thru the Streamripper source and the Litestream source, It
appears that many servers depend on that field.  I realize a lot of this
has to do with the fact that it then determines what type of stream the
client gets (with or without metadata, etc).  However, as the problem I
ran into last night, the server did not know about the client and
therefore would not send back the right info (in this case it would not
stream.  I corrected the issue in the server).

The question is, do most of the servers have to know that field for each
potential client?  If so, this sounds like a waste of code.

What (IMO) would make sense is to do something like this (and this would
require support from the various clients):

User Agent:	stream-mp3/xmms/v1.02
User Agent:	stream-mp3/mpg123/0.59r

Likewise, 

User Agent:	stream-ogg/mpg123/0.59r

That way, a basic server could be just that... it knows what the client
wants based on the UA header.  However, if the server wants to take
advantages of additional features the client supports, it knows the client
and then can do so.

I realize some of this is covered in the Accept field.  However, I've seen
several clients sending only */*.  

Any thoughts or suggestions? I'm throwing this one out fwiw.

Sincerely,

Sean...


-- 
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	--Chevy Chase, Caddyshack
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www.rimboy.com		<-- Your source for the crap you know you need.
www.rimboy.com/rimdistro/rimiradio  <-- Icecast server on a floppy! (i486+)

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