[darcs-devel] darcs patch - remove libcurl dependency

[David Roundy]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 04:53:14PM -0700, Justin Bailey wrote:
> On 6/14/07, David Roundy <droundy at darcs.net> wrote:
> >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.
> 
> Thinking this over, the Network.HTTP implementation offers one
> potentially nice improvement - performance. Otherwise, libcurl really
> does everything needed*. Eric previously pointed me to a ticket ( #377
> ) which involved quite a few issues, but one of them was performance
> on large repositories.
> 
> Would a patch that showed HTTP download improvement and leaves the
> libcurl dependency alone be more acceptable? It sounds like Tim has
> made some progress in the area, but maybe I can do some myself? I'll
> make sure the HTTP module is optional and libcurl will remain the
> fallback for http/s requests when it is not present.

Yeah, that would definitely be good.  As long as you leave the existing
approaches.  You don't even need to show download speed improvement for the
patch to be acceptable: avoiding the requirement for libcurl/curl/wget is
on its own a very good thing.  It's just that we'd rather not avoid that
requirement by substituting another requirement.

I'd love for HTTP to be good enough for us to go with it exclusively, it's
just that so many non-haskell folks build darcs that I am very hesitant to
require them to install any haskell packages beyond ghc.  Particularly
packages where the API might be likely to change reasonably quickly (which
means almost anything outside of base, I'd guess).

> >Does HTTP do ssl connections, by the way?
> 
> Pretty sure it does, but haven't tested. Any servers you could suggest?

No.  That's part of why I'm asking:  I'm not sure how I'd test this, but
I'm sure someone's using it.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University