On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 03:52:36PM -0700, Randall Leeds wrote:
> It seems like couch should probably store content-encoding as metadata
> on the attachment (like content-type) and pass these attachments
> straight to disk and serve them up with the appropriate
> content-encoding

What happens if another client requests the same document but doesn't
understand that particular Content-Encoding?  Couchdb would then have to
refuse to *serve* the document out to the second client, if its
Accept-Encoding: list didn't include the encoding stored to disk.

Or couchdb would have to transcode on demand, potentially twice:
deflate->identity->gzip for example.

> OR reject the original upload as unsupported.

I think it should do this anyway for JSON document bodies. Couchdb shouldn't
attempt to JSON-parse the body if it has come in using an encoding that it
doesn't understand.