Default If-Modified-Since header causes response to be empty

[philbooth]

At some point during May or June, requests to get my commit histories for individual repos started returning empty response bodies. I've only just got round to debugging it now, but it appears that GitHub no longer likes the default value octokat.js sends for the If-Modified-Since header.

The problem can easily be reproduced using curl. This request correctly returns my commit history:

curl -v -X GET -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json" -H "User-Agent: octokat.js" "https://api.github.com/repos/mozilla/fxa-auth-server/commits?author=philbooth"

Whereas this request, identical except for the additional If-Modified-Since header, returns an empty body (but still succeeds):

curl -v -X GET -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json" -H "User-Agent: octokat.js" -H "If-Modified-Since: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT" "https://api.github.com/repos/mozilla/fxa-auth-server/commits?author=philbooth"

I appreciate you haven't made any changes that caused this, but I was wondering if it would be possible to default to no If-Modified-Since header instead of sending it the epoch?

I'm not sure how to report issues with the API to GitHub but if I find out I will also raise this with them.

[philschatz]

Thanks for reporting! I think #104 should fix this issue; could you try checking out the master branch and building locally (since the PR was merged) and see if that fixes your issue?

[philbooth]

Yep, that fix works for me.

[philschatz]

Thanks! Also, the fix is in v0.4.18