I've started fiddling with the cookie issue brought up on the curl mailing
list back in June [1] that I've tried to summarize before [2].

A central point in this new funcionality would be libcurl's added ability to
*write* cookie files, using the Netscape/Mozilla format [3], as this makes it
possible to use (lib)curl in a whole range of new uses that currently would
involve an additional layer of cookie parsing.

But as we're talking about a library here (command line tool talk will come
later in the other list), we need to straighten out some tiny quirks first!
;-)

 1. "back then" there was a suggestion flying around that we could support
    some kind of callback system to allow applications *not* to store the
    cookies in a file, but instead keep them in memory for faster accesses
    when doing many operations. Anyone with a bright idea on how that would
    work?

 2. This system would make libcurl work with an entire collection of cookies,
    I figure many people could end up using their actual set of cookies in
    ~/.netscape/cookies (and similar). Then, how are the libcurl programmer
    gonna be able to control which cookies that are actually used in the
    requests (or possibly the reversed, which are not gonna be used), and
    what cookies that are saved again in the file? We'd need some kind of
    filtering ability, don't we?

 Both these issues can be left to solve later, as they don't necessarily
change the basic functionality.

 [1] = http://curl.haxx.se/mail/archive-2001-06/0092.html
 [2] = http://curl.haxx.se/dev/cookie-jar.txt
 [3] = http://www.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html

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