docs/TODO

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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 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 SIOCGIFADDR on newer Solaris versions as they claim the latter is obsolete.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).

 * Make the curl/*.h headers include the proper system includes based on what
 was present at the time when configure was run. Currently, the sys/select.h
 header is for example included by curl/multi.h only on specific platforms
 we know MUST have it. This is error-prone. We therefore want the header
 files to adapt to configure results. Those results must be stored in a new
 header and they must use a curl name space, i.e not be HAVE_* prefix (as
 that would risk collide with other apps that use libcurl and that runs
 configure).

 LIBCURL - multi interface

 * Make sure we don't ever loop because of non-blocking sockets return
 EWOULDBLOCK or similar. The GnuTLS 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.

 * 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

 * 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

 * Provide a libcurl API for setting mutex callbacks in the underlying SSL
 library, so that the same application code can use mutex-locking
 independently of OpenSSL or GnutTLS being used.

 * 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

 * Fix the connection phase to be non-blocking when multi interface is used

 * Add a way to check if the connection seems to be alive, to correspond to
 the SSL_peak() way we use with OpenSSL.

 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)

 * 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 our own version of stunnel for simple port forwarding to enable HTTPS
 and FTP-SSL tests without the stunnel dependency, and it could allow us to
 provide test tools built with either OpenSSL or GnuTLS

 * 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.