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TODO
Things to do in project cURL. Please tell me what you think, contribute and
send me patches that improve things! Also check the http://curl.haxx.se/dev
web section for various development notes.
LIBCURL
* Consider an interface to libcurl that allows applications to easier get to
know what cookies that are sent back in the response headers.
* Make content encoding/decoding internally be made using a filter system.
* The new 'multi' interface is being designed. Work out the details, start
implementing and write test applications!
[http://curl.haxx.se/lxr/source/lib/multi.h]
* Introduce 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]
* Add configure options that disables certain protocols in libcurl to
decrease footprint. '--disable-[protocol]' where protocol is http, ftp,
telnet, ldap, dict or file.
* Add asynchronous name resolving. http://curl.haxx.se/dev/async-resolver.txt
This should be made to work on most of the supported platforms, or
otherwise it isn't really interesting.
* Data sharing. Tell which easy handles within a multi handle that should
share cookies, connection cache, dns cache, ssl session cache.
* Mutexes. By adding mutex callback support, the 'data sharing' mentioned
above can be made between several easy handles running in different threads
too. The actual mutex implementations will be left for the application to
implement, libcurl will merely call 'getmutex' and 'leavemutex' callbacks.
* No-faster-then-this transfers. Many people have limited bandwidth and they
want the ability to make sure their transfers never use more bandwith than
they think is good.
* Set the SO_KEEPALIVE socket option to make libcurl notice and disconnect
very long time idle connections.
* Make sure we don't ever loop because of non-blocking sockets return
EWOULDBLOCK or similar. This concerns the HTTP request sending, the FTP
command sending etc.
DOCUMENTATION
* Document all CURLcode error codes, why they happen and what most likely
will make them not happen again. In a libcurl point of view.
FTP
* FTP ASCII upload does not follow RFC959 section 3.1.1.1: "The sender
converts the data from an internal character representation to the standard
8-bit NVT-ASCII representation (see the Telnet specification). The
receiver will convert the data from the standard form to his own internal
form."
* An option to only download remote FTP files if they're newer than the local
one is a good idea, and it would fit right into the same syntax as the
already working http dito works. It of course requires that 'MDTM' works,
and it isn't a standard FTP command.
* Add FTPS support with SSL for the data connection too.
HTTP
* HTTP PUT for files passed on stdin *OR* when the --crlf option is
used. Requires libcurl to send the file with chunked content
encoding. [http://curl.haxx.se/dev/HTTP-PUT-stdin.txt] When the filter
system mentioned above gets real, it'll be a piece of cake to add.
* "Content-Encoding: compress/gzip/zlib" HTTP 1.1 clearly defines how to get
and decode compressed documents. There is the zlib that is pretty good at
decompressing stuff. This work was started in October 1999 but halted again
since it proved more work than we thought. It is still a good idea to
implement though. This requires the filter system mentioned above.
* Authentication: NTLM. Support for that MS crap called NTLM
authentication. MS proxies and servers sometime require that. Since that
protocol is a proprietary one, it involves reverse engineering and network
sniffing. This should however be a library-based functionality. There are a
few different efforts "out there" to make open source HTTP clients support
this and it should be possible to take advantage of other people's hard
work. http://modntlm.sourceforge.net/ is one. There's a web page at
http://www.innovation.ch/java/ntlm.html that contains detailed reverse-
engineered info.
* RFC2617 compliance, "Digest Access Authentication" A valid test page seem
to exist at: http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/testpage/digest/ And some friendly
person's server source code is available at
http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/digestauth/index.html Then there's the Apache
mod_digest source code too of course. It seems as if Netscape doesn't
support this, and not many servers do. Although this is a lot better
authentication method than the more common "Basic". Basic sends the
password in cleartext over the network, this "Digest" method uses a
challange-response protocol which increases security quite a lot.
* Pipelining. Sending multiple requests before the previous one(s) are done.
This could possibly be implemented using the multi interface to queue
requests and the response data.
TELNET
* Make TELNET work on windows98!
* 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.
* 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.
SSL
* 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". This whole
idea might become moot if we enable the 'data sharing' as mentioned in the
LIBCURL label above.
* Make curl's SSL layer option capable of using other free SSL libraries.
Such as the Mozilla Security Services
(http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/) and GNUTLS
(http://gnutls.hellug.gr/)
LDAP
* 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.
CLIENT
* "curl ftp://site.com/*.txt"
* Several URLs can be specified to get downloaded. We should be able to use
the same syntax to specify several files to get uploaded (using the same
persistant connection), using -T.
* When the multi interface has been implemented and proved to work, the
client could be told to use maximum N simultaneous transfers and then just
make sure that happens. It should of course not make more than one
connection to the same remote host.
TEST SUITE
* Extend the test suite to include more protocols. The telnet could just do
ftp or http operations (for which we have test servers).
* Make the test suite work on more platforms. OpenBSD and Mac OS. Remove
fork()s and it should become even more portable.
* Introduce a test suite that tests libcurl better and more explicitly.
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