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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 next release:
* Make sure SSL works even when IPv6 is enabled. We just can't connect to
IPv6 sites and use SSL, but we should detect that particular condition
and warn about it.
* Make SSL session ids get used if multiple HTTPS documents from the same
host is requested.
To do in a future release (random order):
* Rewrite parts of the test suite. Make a (XML?) format to store all
test-data in a single for a single test case. The current system makes far
too many separate files. We also need to have the test suite support
different behaviors, like when libcurl is compiled for IPv6 support and
thus performs a different set of FTP commands.
* 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 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/)
* 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.