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.

 * Test the 'multi' interface more.

 * 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
 This should be made to work on most of the supported platforms, or
 otherwise it isn't really interesting.

 * Data sharing. Tell which easy handles within a multi handle that should
 share cookies, connection cache, dns cache, ssl session cache. Full
 suggestion found here: http://curl.haxx.se/dev/sharing.txt

 * Mutexes. By adding mutex callback support, the 'data sharing' mentioned
 above can be made between several easy handles running in different threads
 too. The actual mutex implementations will be left for the application to
 implement, libcurl will merely call 'getmutex' and 'leavemutex' callbacks.
 Part of the sharing suggestion at: http://curl.haxx.se/dev/sharing.txt

 * No-faster-then-this transfers. Many people have limited bandwidth and they
 want the ability to make sure their transfers never use more bandwith than
 they think is good.

 * Set the SO_KEEPALIVE socket option to make libcurl notice and disconnect
 very long time idle connections.

 * Make sure we don't ever loop because of non-blocking sockets return
 EWOULDBLOCK or similar. This concerns the HTTP request sending (and
 especially regular HTTP POST), the FTP command sending etc.

 * Go through the code and verify that libcurl deals with big files >2GB and
 >4GB all over. Bug reports indicate that it doesn't currently work
 properly.

 * Make the built-in progress meter use its own dedicated output stream, and
 make it possible to set it. Use stderr by default.

 DOCUMENTATION

 * Include documentation in the main archive about all the various libcurl
 bindings. 

 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.

 * Add FTPS support with SSL for the data connection too.

 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.

 * Pass a list of host name to libcurl to which we allow the user name and
 password to get sent to. Currently, it only get sent to the host name that
 the first URL uses (to prevent others from being able to read it), but this
 also prevents the authentication info from getting sent when following
 locations to legitimate other host names.

 * "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.

 * 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.

 TELNET

 * Make TELNET work on windows98!

 * 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

 * If you really want to improve the SSL situation, you should probably have a
 look at SSL cafile loading as well - 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). Even better would be to support the SSL
 CAdir option - instead of loading all of the root CA certs for every
 request, this option allows you to only read the CA chain that is actually
 required (into the cache)...

 * 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". This whole
 idea might become moot if we enable the 'data sharing' as mentioned in the
 LIBCURL label above.

 * 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 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/)

 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.

 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.

 * When the multi interface has been implemented and proved to work, 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.

 * 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)

 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.