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Re: Gopher support

From: Daniel Stenberg <daniel_at_haxx.se>
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 12:22:04 +0100 (CET)

On Wed, 30 Jan 2008, Kristian Kjeldsen wrote:

> Something tells me there were valid reasons for its removal, nevertheless,
> it is something i desire, in order for my replacement to have more features
> than the original, not less.

It was removed for a good reason, and there's really no promise anywhere by
anyone that we only add stuff to (lib)curl. I plan to remove more features in
the future. I believe one of the hardest things here is to keep curl focused
on its "core business" and not just suck in every possible feature we can
imagine. I think some of the features/things we did early in the project is of
questionable use - as mentioned in the TODO document for "the next major
release".

Gopher simply didn't work, and if someone would actually care for it I'm sure
there will be a patch that re-introduces it again with a nice set of test
cases so that we can keep the functionality over the years the next time. The
mere fact that we had a broken Gopher implementation for several years also is
a pretty strong indication that it was a feature quite literally NOBODY
wanted...

Another feature that is noticable and was removed (in 7.16.0) is the support
for FTP third party transfers, sometimes referred to as FXP. That was removed
simply because the implementation wasn't fit enough to deal with a rework we
had to do, and nobody stepped forward to massage the code into functioning
with the current way of life.

This is an open source project run by volunteers. It becomes what we make it.

-- 
  Commercial curl and libcurl Technical Support: http://haxx.se/curl.html
Received on 2008-01-30