curl/docs/TODO
2001-09-11 22:35:23 +00:00

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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.
To do in a future release (random order):
* 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."
* Make the connect non-blocking so that timeouts work for connect in
multi-threaded programs
* Consider an interface to libcurl that allows applications to easier get to
know what cookies that are sent back in the response headers.
* HTTP PUT for files passed on stdin. Requires libcurl to send the file
with chunked content encoding. http://curl.haxx.se/dev/HTTP-PUT-stdin.txt
* 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
* 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.
* Suggested on the mailing list: CURLOPT_FTP_MKDIR...!
* Add configure options that disables certain protocols in libcurl to
decrease footprint. '--disable-[protocol]' where protocol is http, ftp,
telnet, ldap, dict or file.
* Extend the test suite to include telnet. The telnet could just do ftp or
http operations (for which we have test servers).
* Make TELNET work on windows!
* 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/)
* Add asynchronous name resolving, as this enables full timeout support for
fork() systems. http://curl.haxx.se/dev/async-resolver.txt
* Move non-URL related functions that are used by both the lib and the curl
application to a separate "portability lib".
* Add libcurl support/interfaces for more languages. C++ wrapper perhaps?
* "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.
* 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.
* Other proxies
Ftp-kind proxy, Socks5, whatever kind of proxies are there?
* Full IPv6 Awareness and support. (This is partly done.) RFC 2428 "FTP
Extensions for IPv6 and NATs" is interesting. PORT should be replaced with
EPRT for IPv6 (done), and EPSV instead of PASV.