_ _ ____ _ ___| | | | _ \| | / __| | | | |_) | | | (__| |_| | _ <| |___ \___|\___/|_| \_\_____| 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 and the connection cache. * 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() http://curl.haxx.se/bug/view.cgi?id=845941 * Use 'struct lifreq' and SIOCGLIFADDR instead of 'struct ifreq' and SIOCGIFADDR on newer Solaris versions as they claim the latter is obsolete. To support ipv6 interface addresses properly. * 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. * Add option that changes the interval in which the progress callback is called at most. * Make libcurl built with c-ares use c-ares' IPv6 abilities. They weren't present when we first added c-ares support but they have been added since! When this is done and works, we can actually start considering making c-ares powered libcurl the default build (which of course would require that we'd bundle the c-ares source code in the libcurl source code releases). * Support CONNECT 407 responses that kill the connection and expect the client to reconnect to complete the authentication. Currently libcurl assumes that a proxy connection will be kept alive. LIBCURL - multi interface * Add a curl_multi_fdset() alternative. 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. * Add curl_multi_socket() and family to the multi interface that gets file descriptors, as an alternative to the curl_multi_fdset(). This is necessary to allow apps to properly avoid the FD_SETSIZE problem. * Make curl_easy_perform() a wrapper-function that simply creates a multi handle, adds the easy handle to it, runs curl_multi_perform() until the transfer is done, then detach the easy handle, destroy the multi handle and return the easy handle's return code. This will thus make everything internally use and assume the multi interface. The select()-loop should use curl_multi_socket(). 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. * 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. Requested 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 capable of using other free SSL libraries. Such as Mozilla Security Services (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/), MatrixSSL (http://www.matrixssl.org/) or yaSSL (http://yassl.com/). At least the latter two could be alternatives for those looking to reduce the footprint of libcurl built with OpenSSL or GnuTLS. * Peter Sylvester's patch for SRP on the TLS layer. Awaits OpenSSL support for this, no need to support this in libcurl before there's an OpenSSL release that does it. * make the configure --with-ssl option first check for OpenSSL and then for GnuTLS if OpenSSL wasn't detected. GnuTLS * Get NTLM working using the functions provided by libgcrypt, since GnuTLS already depends on that to function. Not strictly SSL/TLS related, but hey... Another option is to get available DES and MD4 source code from the cryptopp library. They are fine license-wise, but are C++. * SSL engine stuff? * Work out a common method with Peter Sylvester's OpenSSL-patch for SRP on the TLS to provide name and password 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 * 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 overwriting 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.