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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SIOCGIFADDR on newer Solaris versions as they claim the latter is obsolete.
* 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. Suggested by Alan.
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
* 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.
* 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.