Re: [GNUnet-developers] the status of gnURL

[Christian Grothoff]

On 08/24/2017 10:31 AM, ng0 wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> With the release of 7.55.1-3 I am positive that I achieved one of the
> initial goals of gnURL: cURL and gnURL should be able to exist on one
> system (without the need for downstream packagers to apply further hacks).
>
> So, what's next?
> 
> * New Features?
>   Christian concluded the initial announcement post of gnURL with:
>   "However, we're happy to add new features relating to this core
>   subset and might be easier to convince than the cURL developers."
> 
>   So, what features would you like to see without introducing too
>   much maintenance burden you have to debug? Is there anything
>   cURL doesn't do you'd like to see or change?

Well, what I primarily had in mind was making curl pluggable. We should
dlopen() libraries that support protocols, both in terms of transport
protocol (HTTP/FTP/etc.) and crypto (OpenSSL/GnuTLS/etc.).  That way,
libgnurl itself would not link against the world plus a kitchen sink,
but only against dependencies we actually need.

That said, with GNU (lib)wget2, there is a competitor for cURL (at least
the HTTP-part) on the horizon, and GNU wget2 is already working on using
GNU libmicrohttpd for their test suite, so I think we should take a
closer look at it to see if it might be a better alternative to cURL and
gnURL before investing significant efforts into gnURL.

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