curl/docs/TODO

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TODO

 Things to do in project cURL. Please tell us what you think, contribute and
 send us patches that improve things! Also check the http://curl.haxx.se/dev
 web section for various technical development notes.

 All bugs documented in the KNOWN_BUGS document are subject for fixing!

 LIBCURL

 * Introduce an interface to libcurl that allows applications to easier get to
   know what cookies that are received. CURLINFO_COOKIELIST to get a
   curl_slist with cookies (netscape/mozilla cookie file formatted), and
   CURLOPT_COOKIELIST to set a list of cookies (using the same format).
   http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2004-12/0195.html

 * 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]

 * 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.

 * Introduce a new error code indicating authentication problems (for proxy
   CONNECT error 407 for example). This cannot be an error code, we must not
   return informational stuff as errors, consider a new info returned by
   curl_easy_getinfo() #845941

 * Use 'struct lifreq' and SIOCGLIFADDR instead of 'struct ifreq' and
   SIOCGIFADDR on newer Solaris versions as they claim the latter is obsolete.

 LIBCURL - multi interface

 * Add a curl_multi_fdset() alternative that returns only two arrays with file
   desrciptors for reading and writing to allow the app to use whatever
   function it prefers. Plus, this allows apps to avoid the FD_SETSIZE problem
   with select().

 * Add curl_multi_timeout() to make libcurl's ares-functionality better.

 * Make sure we don't ever loop because of non-blocking sockets return
   EWOULDBLOCK or similar. This FTP command sending, the SSL connection etc.

 * 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.

 DOCUMENTATION

 * More and better

 FTP

 * Code overhaul to make it more state-machine like and to _never_ block on
   waiting for server responses when used with the multi interface.

 * Support GSS/Kerberos 5 for ftp file transfer. This will allow user
   authentication and file encryption.  Possible libraries and example clients
   are available from MIT or Heimdal. Requsted by Markus Moeller.

 * 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.

 * Support the most common FTP proxies, Philip Newton provided a list
   allegedly from ncftp:
   http://curl.haxx.se/mail/archive-2003-04/0126.html

 * Make CURLOPT_FTPPORT support an additional port number on the IP/if/name,
   like "blabla:[port]" or possibly even "blabla:[portfirst]-[portsecond]".

 * FTP ASCII transfers do not follow RFC959. They don't convert the data
   accordingly.

 * Since USERPWD always override the user and password specified in URLs, we
   might need another way to specify user+password for anonymous ftp logins.

 * The FTP code should get a way of returning errors that is known to still
   have the control connection alive and sound. Currently, a returned error
   from within ftp-functions does not tell if the control connection is still
   OK to use or not. This causes libcurl to fail to re-use connections
   slightly too often.

 HTTP

 * 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.

 * 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.

 TELNET

 * 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

 * Anton Fedorov's "dumpcert" patch:
   http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2004-03/0088.html

 * Evaluate/apply Gertjan van Wingerde's SSL patches:
   http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2004-03/0087.html

 * "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.

 * 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".

 * 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! (brought by Chris
   Clark)

 * 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://www.gnu.org/software/gnutls/) This subject has been brought up
   again recently since GPL-licensed applications that link with libcurl MAY
   NOT distribute binaries that use OpenSSL without adding an exception clause
   to the GPL license. See the LICENSE-MIXING document and this:
   http://www.gnome.org/~markmc/openssl-and-the-gpl.html

 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.

 NEW PROTOCOLS

 * TFTP - RFC1350 (protocol) and RFC3617 (URI format)

   Dan Fandrich: I wrote a tftp protocol module as part of the I-Boot
   bootloader under a BSD-style license with attribution clause
   http://download.intrinsyc.com/supported/tools/i-boot-lite/i-boot-lite-1.8/src/libs/net/tftp.c

 * RTSP - RFC2326 (protocol - very HTTP-like, also contains URL description)

 * SFTP/SCP/SSH (no RFCs for protocol nor URI/URL format). An implementation
   should most probably use an existing ssh library, such as OpenSSH.

 * RSYNC (no RFCs for protocol nor URI/URL format).  An implementation should
   most probably use an existing rsync library, such as librsync.

 CLIENT

 * "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.
   (idea from "Brianiac")

 * Globbing support for -d and -F, as in 'curl -d "name=foo[0-9]" URL'.
   Requested by Dane Jensen and others. This is easily scripted though.

 * Add an option that prevents cURL from overwiting 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. Jeff Pohlmeyer suggested.

 * "curl ftp://site.com/*.txt"

 * 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. This would require the client to use
   the multi interface.

 * 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...) (Idea brough to us by kromJx)

 * ability to specify the classic computing suffixes on the range
   specifications. For example, to download the first 500 Kilobytes of a file,
   be able to specify the following for the -r option: "-r 0-500K" or for the
   first 2 Megabytes of a file: "-r 0-2M". (Mark Smith suggested)

 * --data-encode that URL encodes the data before posting
   http://curl.haxx.se/mail/archive-2003-11/0091.html (Kevin Roth suggested)

 * 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.

 BUILD

 * Consider extending 'roffit' to produce decent ASCII output, and use that
   instead of (g)nroff when building src/hugehelp.c

 TEST SUITE

 * Make the test servers able to serve multiple running test suites. Like if
   two users run 'make test' at once.

 * If perl wasn't found by the configure script, don't attempt to run the
   tests but explain something nice why it doesn't.

 * 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.

 NEXT MAJOR RELEASE

 * curl_easy_cleanup() returns void, but curl_multi_cleanup() returns a
   CURLMcode. These should be changed to be the same.

 * remove obsolete defines from curl/curl.h

 * make several functions use size_t instead of int in their APIs

 * 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.

 * Remove support for CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, it has gotten too kludgy and weird
   internally. Let the app judge success or not for itself.