[darcs-devel] darcs patch - remove libcurl dependency

David Roundy droundy at darcs.net
Thu Jun 14 14:44:35 PDT 2007


On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 09:15:55PM +0200, Eric Y. Kow wrote:
> Ok, let's take our time with this one :-)
> I'm in no hurry, just gave my first ooh-less-code-yay reaction.

No problem! But less code is scary.  I'd rather at least let one darcs
stable release have both interfaces, and probably would prefer to keep the
libcurl option open until the HTTP module is packaged in debian stable.

Does HTTP do ssl connections, by the way?

> > I haven't looked at the actual code, but why not leave the existing
> > download mechanisms in place? Removing code is great if the code isn't
> > useful, but I suspect many of the same people who are unable/unwilling to
> > install libcurl would be unable/unwilling to install the HTTP package.
> 
> Well, for some reason I had convinced myself that installing get another
> Haskell-related package would be less painful for people, given that they
> already to install various Haskell packages anyway.  Then again, I
> suppose the stuff they would need to install tends to be standard (for
> example, shipped with the vanilla GHC on MacPorts), whereas the HTTP
> library is not.  So I guess my thinking was off.

And if we require the darcs version of HTTP then we introduce a
chicken-and-egg dilemma where people can't get darcs until they have darcs.
Of course, I'm sure a tarball release will come along soon, but libcurl has
been packaged on linux distributions for a long time now, and HTTP won't be
for a long time, so for many (most?) users the libcurl dependency is
trivial and the HTTP one is not.

Of course, darcs is packaged on most systems these days, so perhaps the
priorities 

> > 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)?
> 
> Well, I think Justin had some motivating examples, and there was
> issue377 where Tim mentioned replacing libcurl with Network.HTTP
> and a few forkIOs

I guess I just don't see a reason to use it to replace rather than
supplement the existing code.  I'm rather hesitant to throw out
known-working code, particularly in the IO realm, where "interesting"
things often happen on rare platforms (like Windows).  Better to add this
as a new option, configured by default perhaps if it's available.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University
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