What is REQUEST_URI supposed to be?

Since REQUEST_URI is fine when I ask the web server running the application directly from the host in question, while accessing it from my local machine through an ssh tunnel (since the application web server is not going to be publicly visible on the Internet) yields the full URI in REQUEST_URI

Unfortunately, neither is the PHP Documentation especially verbose (it just says that REQUEST_URI is “The URI which was given in order to access this page; for instance, ‘/index.html’.”) nor is the apache documentation formally defining REQUEST_URI (the closest to a definition being the documentation for mod_setenvif, which says that REQUEST_URI is “generally the portion of the URL following the scheme and host portion without the query string”).

Did I miss a more formal documentation of apache/PHP’s behavior? Pointers appreciated.

While I was writing this blog entry, which was a lot more angry in its first version, the Gallery guys finally acknowledged that apache and PHP are not sufficiently specifying REQUEST_URI and that I have delivered a valid example where there is a host part in REQUEST_URI. They’re going to work around this. Good news, thanks!

The promised fix is in gallery2 svn, I have applied the patch to my local version, and the application is fine now. Thanks!

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