On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, Christoph Lameter wrote:

> We did have a perl wrapper first but we ran into troubles with
> performance as well as the problem of getting all the info we needed. We
> needed to run curl twice with different options to get all the info. That
> was not acceptable.

Ok. Thanks for your feedback and voices. I realize my initial response didn't
really describe my intentions and my philosophies around these matters.

Let me rewind and rephrase my entire message:

I would happily include features and patches to curl that makes it great to
use with netsaint and other tools as previously described. I do however have
certain requirements on such features:

* Unconditional (without #if or #ifdef) code in the library should be general
  features. I'm sure several of the netsaint-ideas could be made more
  generic and added like this to the library.

* Code that relies on specific conditions or user demands shall be
  conditional, and we add an --enable-feature flag to configure to switch on
  that particular feature set. Like kerberos-ftp and https work already.

* Client-code. Rather than adding lots of weird options to the curl tool, you
  can often enough clone the entire client code, strip off the stuff you
  don't want or need and add the things your special condition needs. This
  would then build a separate executable for this special purpose.

I believe most of what was posted in the initial patch can be added in the
third category.

I'm indeed open to add "hooks" to the library that would allow the client to
add "filtering" functionality like regex-searching. I would imagine that the
client sets a hook before a download and then the specified "filter-function"
gets called by the library during download to do the filtering the client
wants.

The initial patch added 3 rather independent features. -g, -G and -j. -g
changed the output, -G added regex-searching and -j somehow changed the
treatmeant of the error code. Which of these really require library changes?

-- 
  Daniel Stenberg -- curl project maintainer -- http://curl.haxx.se/