_ _ ____ _ ___| | | | _ \| | / __| | | | |_) | | | (__| |_| | _ <| |___ \___|\___/|_| \_\_____| Things that could be nice to do in the future Things to do in project cURL. Please tell us what you think, contribute and send us patches that improve things! All bugs documented in the KNOWN_BUGS document are subject for fixing! 1. libcurl 1.1 Zero-copy interface 1.2 More data sharing 1.3 struct lifreq 1.4 Get IP address 1.5 c-ares ipv6 1.6 configure-based info in public headers 2. libcurl - multi interface 2.1 More non-blocking 2.2 Pause transfers 2.3 Remove easy interface internally 2.4 Avoid having to remove/readd handles 3. Documentation 3.1 More and better 4. FTP 4.1 PRET 4.2 Alter passive/active on failure and retry 4.3 Earlier bad letter detection 4.4 REST for large files 4.5 FTP proxy support 4.6 PORT port range 4.7 ASCII support 5. HTTP 5.1 Other HTTP versions with CONNECT 5.2 Better persistancy for HTTP 1.0 6. TELNET 6.1 ditch stdin 6.2 ditch telnet-specific select 7. SSL 7.1 Disable specific versions 7.2 Provide mytex locking API 7.3 dumpcert 7.4 Evaluate SSL patches 7.5 Cache OpenSSL contexts 7.6 Export session ids 7.7 Provide callback for cert verfication 7.8 Support other SSL libraries 7.9 Support SRP on the TLS layer 7.10 improve configure --with-ssl 8. GnuTLS 8.1 Make NTLM work without OpenSSL functions 8.2 SSl engine stuff 8.3 SRP 8.4 non-blocking 8.5 check connection 9. LDAP 9.1 ditch ldap-specific select 10. New protocols 10.1 RTSP 10.2 RSYNC 11. Client 11.1 Content-Disposition 11.2 sync 11.3 glob posts 11.4 prevent file overwriting 11.5 ftp wildcard download 11.6 simultaneous parallel transfers 11.7 provide formpost headers 11.8 url-specific options 12. Build 12.1 roffit 13. Test suite 13.1 SSL tunnel 13.2 nicer lacking perl message 13.3 more protocols supported 13.4 more platforms supported 14. Next SONAME bump 14.1 http-style HEAD output for ftp 14.2 combine error codes 15. Next major release 15.1 cleanup return codes 15.2 remove obsolete defines 15.3 size_t 15.4 remove several functions 15.5 remove CURLOPT_FAILONERROR ============================================================================== 1. libcurl 1.1 Zero-copy interface Introdue another callback interface for upload/download that makes one less copy of data and thus a faster operation. [http://curl.haxx.se/dev/no_copy_callbacks.txt] 1.2 More data sharing curl_share_* functions already exist and work, and they can be extended to share more. For example, enable sharing of the ares channel and the connection cache. 1.3 struct lifreq Use 'struct lifreq' and SIOCGLIFADDR instead of 'struct ifreq' and SIOCGIFADDR on newer Solaris versions as they claim the latter is obsolete. To support ipv6 interface addresses for network interfaces properly. 1.4 Get IP address Add the following to curl_easy_getinfo(): GET_HTTP_IP, GET_FTP_IP and GET_FTP_DATA_IP. Return a string with the used IP. 1.5 c-ares ipv6 Make libcurl built with c-ares use c-ares' IPv6 abilities. They weren't present when we first added c-ares support but they have been added since! When this is done and works, we can actually start considering making c-ares powered libcurl the default build (which of course would require that we'd bundle the c-ares source code in the libcurl source code releases). 1.6 configure-based info in public headers Make the public headers include the proper system includes based on what was present at the time when configure was run. Currently, the sys/select.h header is for example included by curl/multi.h only on specific platforms we know MUST have it. This is error-prone. We therefore want the header files to adapt to configure results. Those results must be stored in a new header and they must use a curl name space, i.e not be HAVE_* prefix (as that would risk collide with other apps that use libcurl and that runs configure). Work on this has been started but hasn't been finished, and the initial patch and some details are found here: http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2006-12/0084.html The remaining problems to solve involve the platforms that can't run configure. 2. libcurl - multi interface 2.1 More non-blocking Make sure we don't ever loop because of non-blocking sockets return EWOULDBLOCK or similar. The GnuTLS connection etc. 2.2 Pause transfers Make transfers treated more carefully. We need a way to tell libcurl we have data to write, as the current system expects us to upload data each time the socket is writable and there is no way to say that we want to upload data soon just not right now, without that aborting the upload. The opposite situation should be possible as well, that we tell libcurl we're ready to accept read data. Today libcurl feeds the data as soon as it is available for reading, no matter what. 2.3 Remove easy interface internally Make curl_easy_perform() a wrapper-function that simply creates a multi handle, adds the easy handle to it, runs curl_multi_perform() until the transfer is done, then detach the easy handle, destroy the multi handle and return the easy handle's return code. This will thus make everything internally use and assume the multi interface. The select()-loop should use curl_multi_socket(). 2.4 Avoid having to remove/readd handles curl_multi_handle_control() - this can control the easy handle (while) added to a multi handle in various ways: o RESTART, unconditionally restart this easy handle's transfer from the start, re-init the state o RESTART_COMPLETED, restart this easy handle's transfer but only if the existing transfer has already completed and it is in a "finished state". o STOP, just stop this transfer and consider it completed o PAUSE? o RESUME? 3. Documentation 3.1 More and better Exactly 4. FTP 4.1 PRET PRET is a command that primarily "drftpd" supports, which could be useful when using libcurl against such a server. It is a non-standard and a rather oddly designed command, but... http://curl.haxx.se/bug/feature.cgi?id=1729967 4.2 Alter passive/active on failure and retry When trying to connect passively to a server which only supports active connections, libcurl returns CURLE_FTP_WEIRD_PASV_REPLY and closes the connection. There could be a way to fallback to an active connection (and vice versa). http://curl.haxx.se/bug/feature.cgi?id=1754793 4.3 Earlier bad letter detection Make the detection of (bad) %0d and %0a codes in FTP url parts earlier in the process to avoid doing a resolve and connect in vain. 4.4 REST for large files REST fix for servers not behaving well on >2GB requests. This should fail if the server doesn't set the pointer to the requested index. The tricky (impossible?) part is to figure out if the server did the right thing or not. 4.5 FTP proxy support Support the most common FTP proxies, Philip Newton provided a list allegedly from ncftp. This is not a subject without debate, and is probably not really suitable for libcurl. http://curl.haxx.se/mail/archive-2003-04/0126.html 4.6 PORT port range Make CURLOPT_FTPPORT support an additional port number on the IP/if/name, like "blabla:[port]" or possibly even "blabla:[portfirst]-[portsecond]". http://curl.haxx.se/bug/feature.cgi?id=1505166 4.7 ASCII support FTP ASCII transfers do not follow RFC959. They don't convert the data accordingly. 5. HTTP 5.1 Other HTTP versions with CONNECT When doing CONNECT to a HTTP proxy, libcurl always uses HTTP/1.0. This has never been reported as causing trouble to anyone, but should be considered to use the HTTP version the user has chosen. 5.2 Better persistancy for HTTP 1.0 "Better" support for persistent connections over HTTP 1.0 http://curl.haxx.se/bug/feature.cgi?id=1089001 6. TELNET 6.1 ditch stdin Reading input (to send to the remote server) on stdin is a crappy solution for library purposes. We need to invent a good way for the application to be able to provide the data to send. 6.2 ditch telnet-specific select Move the telnet support's network select() loop go away and merge the code into the main transfer loop. Until this is done, the multi interface won't work for telnet. 7. SSL 7.1 Disable specific versions Provide an option that allows for disabling specific SSL versions, such as SSLv2 http://curl.haxx.se/bug/feature.cgi?id=1767276 7.2 Provide mytex locking API Provide a libcurl API for setting mutex callbacks in the underlying SSL library, so that the same application code can use mutex-locking independently of OpenSSL or GnutTLS being used. 7.3 dumpcert Anton Fedorov's "dumpcert" patch: http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2004-03/0088.html 7.4 Evaluate SSL patches Evaluate/apply Gertjan van Wingerde's SSL patches: http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2004-03/0087.html 7.5 Cache OpenSSL contexts "Look at SSL cafile - quick traces look to me like these are done on every request as well, when they should only be necessary once per ssl context (or once per handle)". The major improvement we can rather easily do is to make sure we don't create and kill a new SSL "context" for every request, but instead make one for every connection and re-use that SSL context in the same style connections are re-used. It will make us use slightly more memory but it will libcurl do less creations and deletions of SSL contexts. 7.6 Export session ids Add an interface to libcurl that enables "session IDs" to get exported/imported. Cris Bailiff said: "OpenSSL has functions which can serialise the current SSL state to a buffer of your choice, and recover/reset the state from such a buffer at a later date - this is used by mod_ssl for apache to implement and SSL session ID cache". 7.7 Provide callback for cert verfication OpenSSL supports a callback for customised verification of the peer certificate, but this doesn't seem to be exposed in the libcurl APIs. Could it be? There's so much that could be done if it were! 7.8 Support other SSL libraries Make curl's SSL layer capable of using other free SSL libraries. Such as MatrixSSL (http://www.matrixssl.org/). 7.9 Support SRP on the TLS layer Peter Sylvester's patch for SRP on the TLS layer. Awaits OpenSSL support for this, no need to support this in libcurl before there's an OpenSSL release that does it. 7.10 improve configure --with-ssl make the configure --with-ssl option first check for OpenSSL, then GnuTLS, then NSS... 8. GnuTLS 8.1 Make NTLM work without OpenSSL functions Get NTLM working using the functions provided by libgcrypt, since GnuTLS already depends on that to function. Not strictly SSL/TLS related, but hey... Another option is to get available DES and MD4 source code from the cryptopp library. They are fine license-wise, but are C++. 8.2 SSl engine stuff Is this even possible? 8.3 SRP Work out a common method with Peter Sylvester's OpenSSL-patch for SRP on the TLS to provide name and password. GnuTLS already supports it... 8.4 non-blocking Fix the connection phase to be non-blocking when multi interface is used 8.5 check connection Add a way to check if the connection seems to be alive, to correspond to the SSL_peak() way we use with OpenSSL. 9. LDAP 9.1 ditch ldap-specific select * Look over the implementation. The looping will have to "go away" from the lib/ldap.c source file and get moved to the main network code so that the multi interface and friends will work for LDAP as well. 10. New protocols 10.1 RTSP RFC2326 (protocol - very HTTP-like, also contains URL description) 10.2 RSYNC There's no RFC for protocol nor URI/URL format. An implementation should most probably use an existing rsync library, such as librsync. 11. Client 11.1 Content-Disposition Add option that is similar to -O but that takes the output file name from the Content-Disposition: header, and/or uses the local file name used in redirections for the cases the server bounces the request further to a different file (name): http://curl.haxx.se/bug/feature.cgi?id=1364676 11.2 sync "curl --sync http://example.com/feed[1-100].rss" or "curl --sync http://example.net/{index,calendar,history}.html" Downloads a range or set of URLs using the remote name, but only if the remote file is newer than the local file. A Last-Modified HTTP date header should also be used to set the mod date on the downloaded file. 11.3 glob posts Globbing support for -d and -F, as in 'curl -d "name=foo[0-9]" URL'. This is easily scripted though. 11.4 prevent file overwriting Add an option that prevents cURL from overwriting existing local files. When used, and there already is an existing file with the target file name (either -O or -o), a number should be appended (and increased if already existing). So that index.html becomes first index.html.1 and then index.html.2 etc. 11.5 ftp wildcard download "curl ftp://site.com/*.txt" 11.6 simultaneous parallel transfers The client could be told to use maximum N simultaneous parallel transfers and then just make sure that happens. It should of course not make more than one connection to the same remote host. This would require the client to use the multi interface. http://curl.haxx.se/bug/feature.cgi?id=1558595 11.7 provide formpost headers Extending the capabilities of the multipart formposting. How about leaving the ';type=foo' syntax as it is and adding an extra tag (headers) which works like this: curl -F "coolfiles=@fil1.txt;headers=@fil1.hdr" where fil1.hdr contains extra headers like Content-Type: text/plain; charset=KOI8-R" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 X-User-Comment: Please don't use browser specific HTML code which should overwrite the program reasonable defaults (plain/text, 8bit...) 11.8 url-specific options Provide a way to make options bound to a specific URL among several on the command line. Possibly by letting ':' separate options between URLs, similar to this: curl --data foo --url url.com : \ --url url2.com : \ --url url3.com --data foo3 (More details: http://curl.haxx.se/mail/archive-2004-07/0133.html) The example would do a POST-GET-POST combination on a single command line. 12. Build 12.1 roffit Consider extending 'roffit' to produce decent ASCII output, and use that instead of (g)nroff when building src/hugehelp.c 13. Test suite 13.1 SSL tunnel Make our own version of stunnel for simple port forwarding to enable HTTPS and FTP-SSL tests without the stunnel dependency, and it could allow us to provide test tools built with either OpenSSL or GnuTLS 13.2 nicer lacking perl message If perl wasn't found by the configure script, don't attempt to run the tests but explain something nice why it doesn't. 13.3 more protocols supported Extend the test suite to include more protocols. The telnet could just do ftp or http operations (for which we have test servers). 13.4 more platforms supported Make the test suite work on more platforms. OpenBSD and Mac OS. Remove fork()s and it should become even more portable. 14. Next SONAME bump 14.1 http-style HEAD output for ftp #undef CURL_FTP_HTTPSTYLE_HEAD in lib/ftp.c to remove the HTTP-style headers from being output in NOBODY requests over ftp 14.2 combine error codes Combine some of the error codes to remove duplicates. The original numbering should not be changed, and the old identifiers would be macroed to the new ones in an CURL_NO_OLDIES section to help with backward compatibility. Candidates for removal and their replacements: CURLE_FILE_COULDNT_READ_FILE => CURLE_REMOTE_FILE_NOT_FOUND CURLE_FTP_COULDNT_RETR_FILE => CURLE_REMOTE_FILE_NOT_FOUND CURLE_FTP_COULDNT_USE_REST => CURLE_RANGE_ERROR CURLE_FUNCTION_NOT_FOUND => CURLE_FAILED_INIT CURLE_LDAP_INVALID_URL => CURLE_URL_MALFORMAT CURLE_TFTP_NOSUCHUSER => CURLE_TFTP_ILLEGAL CURLE_TFTP_NOTFOUND => CURLE_REMOTE_FILE_NOT_FOUND CURLE_TFTP_PERM => CURLE_REMOTE_ACCESS_DENIED 15. Next major release 15.1 cleanup return codes curl_easy_cleanup() returns void, but curl_multi_cleanup() returns a CURLMcode. These should be changed to be the same. 15.2 remove obsolete defines remove obsolete defines from curl/curl.h 15.3 size_t make several functions use size_t instead of int in their APIs 15.4 remove several functions remove the following functions from the public API: curl_getenv curl_mprintf (and variations) curl_strequal curl_strnequal They will instead become curlx_ - alternatives. That makes the curl app still capable of building with them from source. 15.5 remove CURLOPT_FAILONERROR Remove support for CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, it has gotten too kludgy and weird internally. Let the app judge success or not for itself.