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!

To do for the 7.8 release:

 * Make SSL session ids get used if multiple HTTPS documents from the same
   host is requested.

 * Document the undocumented libcurl functions: the printf clones (like
   curl_msprintf, curl_mfprintf, curl_msnprintf, curl_maprintf and
   curl_mvfprintf), the string compare functions (curl_strequal
   and curl_strnequal) and the URL escape/unescape functions.

To do in a future release (random order):

 * 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 and https. The telnet could just do
   ftp or http operations (for which we have test servers) and the https would
   probably work against/with some of the openssl tools.

 * Add a command line option that allows the output file to get the same time
   stamp as the remote file. libcurl already is capable of fetching the remote
   file's date.

 * Make the SSL layer option capable of using the Mozilla Security Services as
   an alternative to OpenSSL:
   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/

 * Add asynchronous name resolving, as this enables full timeout support for
   fork() systems.

 * Non-blocking connect(), also to make timeouts work on windows.

 * Move non-URL related functions that are used by both the lib and the curl
   application to a separate "portability lib".

 * Add support for other languages than C.  C++ (rumours have been heard about
   something being worked on in this area) and perl (we have seen the first
   versions of this!) comes to mind. Python anyone?

 * "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?

 * 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.  HTTP proxies are left to
   add support for.

 * SSL for more protocols, like SSL-FTP...
   (http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-murray-auth-ftp-ssl-05.txt)