[oops, originally sent this to tbnl@... hope that's not a different list or person. Hasn't bounced in any case.]
There seems to be some small bugs involving header-out. The accessor is documented to take both keywords and strings, but neither works reliably because: The reader will use string-equal if given a string and eq if given a symbol, because of the assoc shadowing in the hunchentoot package. This will find what it's looking for if it's given a string or if it's given a keyword _and_ the header entry was originally created with a keyword.
The writer will do the same, so it's possible to have two different entries for any given header in the headers-out list, one for a string entry and one for a symbol. (The code _looks_ like it does the right thing, but if "name" is a symbol, it calls the symbol-specialized version of assoc which ignores its test argument).
Finally, if a header-out entry is created with a symbol, response generation fails because it uses write-string (or write-line with mod-lisp) to output the header name, and they don't take string designators.
Here's a patch which normalizes things so the keys of this alist are always strings and the lookup is always done with strings. It uses string-capitalize to convert keywords when storing in order to make them have conventional HTTP header capitalization.
--- hunchentoot-0.4.8.orig/reply.lisp 2006-11-05 15:55:06.000000000 -0700 +++ hunchentoot-0.4.8/reply.lisp 2006-11-08 15:40:15.000000000 -0700 @@ -115,7 +115,7 @@ (defun header-out (name &optional (reply *reply*)) "Returns the current value of the outgoing http header named NAME. NAME should be a keyword or a string." - (cdr (assoc name (headers-out reply)))) + (cdr (assoc (string name) (headers-out reply))))
(defun cookie-out (name &optional (reply *reply*)) "Returns the current value of the outgoing cookie named @@ -129,7 +129,8 @@ created." (with-rebinding (name reply) (with-unique-names (place) - `(let ((,place (assoc ,name (headers-out ,reply) :test #'string-equal))) + `(let* ((,name (if (stringp ,name) ,name (string-capitalize ,name))) + (,place (assoc ,name (headers-out ,reply)))) (cond (,place (setf (cdr ,place) ,new-value))