[darcs-devel] darcs patch - remove libcurl dependency

[Justin Bailey]

On 6/14/07, David Roundy <droundy at darcs.net> wrote:
> Why replace three more powerful options with a single less powerful option
> that also complicates the build process (not the configure script, but the
> sequence that user must go through to compile darcs)? I do hope that at a
> minimum the new patch allows us to compile without HTTP support?

I think the build process is less  complex with this library. In order
to create the patch, I needed to build darcs on Windows. It was
definitely a non-trivial process (see these instructions on the wiki:
http://darcs.net/DarcsWiki/BuildingUnderWindows). Libcurl was a small
but fragile portion of it. I needed to download a library, ensure it
was built correctly itself, and then, because my MinGW installation
had some strange paths, I needed to be sure to pass the right compiler
flags to configure (CPPFLAGS & LDFLAGS). At least with the HTTP
library, the download and install is pretty straightforward due to
Cabal packagin, and no extra flags are required.

FTP support is a loss, and I would be glad to add support for those
URLs if this patch is accepted. Updating the configure script to allow
compiles without HTTP support would be pretty straightforward, too.

Justin