curl/docs/TODO

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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/dev/multi.h]

 * Add a name resolve cache to libcurl to make repeated fetches to the same
   host name (when persitancy isn't available) faster.

 * 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

 DOCUMENTATION

 * Document all CURLcode error codes, why they happen and what most likely
   will make them not happen again.

 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.

 * Suggested on the mailing list: CURLOPT_FTP_MKDIR...!

 * Always use the FTP SIZE command before downloading, as that makes it more
   likely that we know the size when downloading. Some sites support SIZE but
   don't show the size in the RETR response!

 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.

 TELNET

 * Make TELNET work on windows98!

 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"

 * 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/)

 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.

 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.