On Thu, 2008-08-07 at 12:17 +0200, Patrick Monnerat wrote:
> I'm sure there are lots of SOAP users that have renounced on using
> libcurl because of the lack of a MIME parser.

Speaking as a SOAP user who didn't renounce libcurl :-), it is still not
terribly obvious to me that you gain much by including the MIME parser
within libcurl. Can you quantify exactly what you expect the benefits
to be, compared to doing it externally? You have spoken about code
sharing but the sections of code that are going to be shared seem to be
small, general-purpose routines like curl_slist_* which are easy to
re-implement and don't really form part of libcurl's set of core
attractions.

To be honest it never really occurred to me that MIME parsing should be
libcurl's responsibility, any more than I expected it to include an XML
parser or an HTTP server. I ended up having to write both of those
things for my SOAP implementation but I didn't consider this a black
mark against libcurl. Indeed, if I hadn't used libcurl I would probably
have found myself needing to write an HTTP client as well, which would
have been even worse.

That's not to say that I think your project to write a MIME library is a
bad one: on the contrary, I think it is a splendid idea. But I really
do struggle to see how it is a natural fit as part of libcurl.

p.
Received on 2008-08-07