From: Stephen Bannasch <stephen.bannasch@...>
Date: 2007-10-31T22:28:52+09:00
Subject: patch for lib/net/http.rb, self['User-Agent'] ||= 'Ruby'

I posted this patch before in the middle of another thread and didn't 
get any feedback so I'm posting it again. Here's a link to my 
original message with a longer description of the problem:

   http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-core/12107

Basically there are some web servers which return a 'HTTP/1.1 500 
Internal Server Error' when an HTTP GET request is made and the 
'User-Agent:' header is not present.

After applying this patch the 'User-Agent:' header is set to 'Ruby' 
unless it is already defined.

Index: lib/net/http.rb
===================================================================
--- lib/net/http.rb     (revision 13794)
+++ lib/net/http.rb     (working copy)
@@ -1471,6 +1471,7 @@
        @path = path
        initialize_http_header initheader
        self['Accept'] ||= '*/*'
+      self['User-Agent'] ||= 'Ruby'
        @body = nil
        @body_stream = nil
      end