On Sun, 30 Aug 2015, Alex Bligh wrote:

>> Like they may then wrongly believe that curl would act differently if you
>> did -XPOST or -XGET, when in fact curl doesn't care about what -X is set
>> to, but it is the other option(s) that control how it behaves.
>
> Really? I'm feeling slightly sensitive about this as it took me a little
> while yesterday to work out why my otherwise working script failed when I
> added a '-d' component - I'd not explicitly set '-X GET' but relied on it
> being the default.

Again, GET is the default, but you changed that with -d. -d does a POST so it
changes the method to POST.

> I thought in such a circumstance (presence of -d), '-X GET' did explicitly
> change the HTTP action from POST to GET.

That command line also would not cause a warning from my patch.

It changed the request into a GET with a request-body. That's a highly unusual
request and exactly for which purpose -X was created. I think using -X for
something like that is exactly right.

> Removing '-X GET' breaks it, as it uses 'POST' instead of 'GET'.

Just ramdomly removing -X uses will of course cause some scripts to not work
anymore, namely those uses that don't use superfluous -Xs.

> However, anyone reading that example and an example without '-d' will have
> to understand how curl changes the HTTP action depending on presence of
> '-d'.

Yes. But as I said already, I believe that's the right thing to teach users.

Or make it one step more complicated: add -L to your command line and see how
using -X can really screw things up in the subsequent request...

I note your opinion on this, even if I disagree with it.

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se
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