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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.
LIBCURL
* Introduce an interface to libcurl that allows applications to easier get to
know what cookies that are received. Pushing interface that calls a
callback on each received cookie? Querying interface that asks about
existing cookies? We probably need both.
* Make content encoding/decoding internally be made using a filter system.
* 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]
* Run-time querying about library characterics. What protocols do this
running libcurl support? What is the version number of the running libcurl
(returning the well-defined version-#define). This could possibly be made
by allowing curl_easy_getinfo() work with a NULL pointer for global info,
but perhaps better would be to introduce a new curl_getinfo() (or similar)
function for global info reading.
* Add asynchronous name resolving (http://daniel.haxx.se/resolver/). 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. Full
suggestion found here: http://curl.haxx.se/dev/sharing.txt
* 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.
Part of the sharing suggestion at: http://curl.haxx.se/dev/sharing.txt
* Set the SO_KEEPALIVE socket option to make libcurl notice and disconnect
very long time idle connections.
* Go through the code and verify that libcurl deals with big files >2GB and
>4GB all over. Bug reports (and source reviews) indicate that it doesn't
currently work properly.
* Make the built-in progress meter use its own dedicated output stream, and
make it possible to set it. Use stderr by default.
* CURLOPT_MAXFILESIZE. Prevent downloads that are larger than the specified
size. CURLE_FILESIZE_EXCEEDED would then be returned. Gautam Mani
requested. That is, the download should even begin but be aborted
immediately.
* Allow the http_proxy (and other) environment variables to contain user and
password as well in the style: http://proxyuser:proxypasswd@proxy:port
Berend Reitsma suggested.
LIBCURL - multi interface
* Make sure we don't ever loop because of non-blocking sockets return
EWOULDBLOCK or similar. This concerns the HTTP request sending (and
especially regular HTTP POST), the FTP command sending etc.
* Make uploads treated better. 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.
DOCUMENTATION
* More and better
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. This should be made
according to the specs written in draft-murray-auth-ftp-ssl-08.txt,
"Securing FTP with TLS"
HTTP
* Pass a list of host name to libcurl to which we allow the user name and
password to get sent to. Currently, it only get sent to the host name that
the first URL uses (to prevent others from being able to read it), but this
also prevents the authentication info from getting sent when following
locations to legitimate other host names.
* "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
* If you really want to improve the SSL situation, you should probably have a
look at SSL cafile loading as well - 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). Even better would be to support the SSL
CAdir option - instead of loading all of the root CA certs for every
request, this option allows you to only read the CA chain that is actually
required (into the cache)...
* 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.
* 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://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
* 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"
* 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.
* 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)
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.