Should "std.net.curl" be moved from Phobos to Deimos?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 11/25/13 4:36 PM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Tuesday, 26 November 2013 at 00:13:57 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> First I'd like to gather an understanding on why we seem to have this
>> problem (far as I understand, the likes of php and python are doing
>> fine with curl, but maybe I'm wrong).
>
> A major difference is there's only one php/python binary, usually build
> on the same system that uses it. Phobos, on the other hand, is generally
> built on the packager's computer, which isn't always binary compatible
> with the deployment box.
>
> On Windows, the problem is simply that curl isn't packaged with dmd, for
> some weird reason, meaning people have to get curl.lib separately.
> That's idiotic. But then again, so are a lot of the dmd Windows
> deficiencies.

Please let me know whether my understanding of the situation is correct:

1. If people have a working installation of libcurl on their machine, we 
work with it.

2. Otherwise, phobos works fine but attempting to use std.net.curl will 
fail.

Is this correct? If not, please explain exactly why. If yes, this setup 
seems entirely appropriate to me.

>> If we do decide to do away with libcurl, one possible solution would
>> be to embed its source code within our build. That way we wouldn't
>> break code that already uses it.
>
> Yes, that would be ideal, we should just statically link curl right into
> the phobos build so it just works everywhere.

There are several questions associated with this.

1. Does the author of libcurl agree with such? My understanding is he would.

2. Would we need to actually build libcurl from source, or just 
distribute it? In the former case, it would be quite odd that we'd need 
to do that (and presumably we'd need to take some maintenance burden, too).

3. What if people already have some working libcurl version and would 
want to use that?


Andrei