On Deprecated Reason - Phrase

[jansupol]

RFC 2616 describes Response status codes and the respective reason phrase. That's what was used at the time of creating ReasonPhrase in JAX-RS.

The RFC 7230 says the reason-phrase should be ignored by the client:

The reason-phrase element exists for the sole purpose of providing a textual description associated with the numeric status code, mostly out of deference to earlier Internet application protocols that were more frequently used with interactive text clients. A client SHOULD ignore the reason-phrase content.

• The HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 do not contain the reason-phrase
• The reason phrase has been dropped by TomCat years ago.
• Jetty dropped the reason phrase (by default) recently.
• Servlet 6 dropped the long-time deprecated setStatus(int, String). It supports sendError(int String), but the String is not meant to be the ReasonPhrase, rather is an error description, and it is for the error statuses only.

The API [reason-phrase](https://jakarta.ee/specifications/restful-ws/3.1/apidocs/jakarta.ws.rs/jakarta/ws/rs/core/response.statustype#getReasonPhrase()) makes customer create the response with the reason phrase, but the deprecated reason phrase is not well propagated to the customer.

WDYT, should Jakarta REST continue with supporting the reason phrase?

[mkarg]

I never understood the benefits of the reason phrase and never used it or never saw code that used it. OTOH I do not see the benefit of dropping it. Dropping it might make existing code break, so why should we drop it?

[spericas]

I agree with @mkarg