Path on XBackend

[LiorLieberman]

Wondering if we really need path on XBackend.

Our model is that we reference XBackend from an HTTPRoute, which has path matchers.

Its unclear currently what benefit we receive from having a path on XBackend as well, and if and how we should handle conflicts.

Would be good to check with more prior art

/cc @haiyanmeng
/cc @howardjohn

[howardjohn]

I believe this is good and bad depending on the case really.

General purpose proxying, like I am sending to google.com -- its a bit weird to put path there,should be derived from the route (which can do a url rewrite). You wouldn't want users to put a backend per path...

Specialized proxy, like connecting to openai. Do I need users to know how to map to /v1/chat/completions, /v1/responses, etc? Or, should i just have them say "send to openai" and be able to figure out where it should go based on what type of request it was.

MCP is a bit in the middle; there is not really a variable-path in MCP typically, just one path (/mcp most commonly), so is it worth making users always do urlRewrites for it?