On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, Cris Bailiff wrote:

(I'm only commenting a few items here, not that the others are bad ideas,
just that I feel the urge to comment on some of them!)

http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/future.html was just updated to reflect my latest
whims. ;-)

> Don't know what 'DICT' does, I don't use it

Based on not so very much input, I puy DICT on the list of things to get
dumped in v8 unless someone stands up for it.

> I would like to use the LDAP support - just haven't got a round to it yet
> (I'm using perl Net::ldap, but good curl support might be better).
> Improvements would be figuring out the correct openldap .so to load at
> build time (rather than hope for the best at run-time) and better parseable
> output from ldap urls (I don't know if this is curls' fault). I guess you
> should be able to update ldap entries through curl ldap urls, but I haven't
> even dared consider how to do that...

I moved LDAP over to the "to get improved" list for v8 after similar comments
from several people. The current ldap output format is pretty much due to
what the openldap functions pass on to curl.

We also want the whole LDAP data retrieving function remodeled to better work
(actually, to work at all) with the upcoming multi interface. It is too
"synchronous" in its current implementation.

> * Async DNS and/or DNS caching - w3clib does some fancy caching of dns
> results and weights and round-robins according to selectable external
> policy. Quite nice I think.

DNS caching could be added any day. Sterling Hughes took the task on his
shoulders, but I know he's under a lot of work now so it might take some time
for him. If anyone else wants to get in and help out here, just yell.

Async DNS is a tricky business. I want this to work on "most" operating
systems, and thus it must be written in a rather portable fashion. I know
Alex Graveley's libsoup (part of GNOME) says it does this on "all
posix-compliant unixes" and windows. Might be usable as inspiration (not
source code though due to licensing issues).

> * NTLM authentication & proxy authentication Nice for those stuck behind
> inflexible, non-standards MS-Poxy servers and needing to connect to
> intranet servers outsied their control. Can't just lift the samba code, due
> to incompatible licencing, but the protocol description is freely
> available, and I've seen free python code do this already. Good connection
> pooling would cut down the processing overhead of this ridiculous protocol
> violiation...

Thanks to the persistant connection support we already have, this shouldn't
be too hard to add.

Both Pavuk and libsoup also claim NTLM support, suggesting that there are a
few different code implementations to study (AFAIK, there's no implementation
with a license good enough for us to use).

> I haven't followed the 'multi' discussion in detail, but as long as I can
> plug in an external event loop I think it would be fine.

It'll do that and more.

-- 
    Daniel Stenberg -- curl groks URLs -- http://curl.haxx.se/