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

[Brad Anderson]

On Tuesday, 26 November 2013 at 19:23:54 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky 
wrote:
> 26-Nov-2013 23:00, Andrei Alexandrescu пишет:
>>> There may be other problems, but I think that those are the 
>>> two bigs
>>> ones, and
>>> they've come up several times (particularly the issues with 
>>> libcurl and
>>> Windows).
>>
>> I've asked the question "what exactly is the problem" several 
>> times and
>> you came closest to answering it, but a bunch of stuff is 
>> still unclear
>> to me.
>
> I thought I'd chime in on this.
>
> I find that if we actually worked on getting curl integrated 
> better it may just as well be an all right network client lib.
>
> For the moment it looks as if half people are pissed off 
> because of the work they would need to do on it (workaround, 
> shipping, maintenance, etc.), and the other half (using it) are 
> having usability problems on all fronts.
>
> Now to my limited experience with it.
> When I work with it on Linux I have to always jump through 
> hoops because of:
> https://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=7044
>

This is a constant annoyance of mine using std.net.curl on Linux.

> Now if that doesn't set off the alarms. Win32/64 curl libraries 
> are NOT shipped with dmd zip or whatever. The better thing is 
> that last time I checked there is no proper which means that 
> for Win32 one had to get the rare OMF object file format (a 
> custom compilation no less).

Nah, it was as simple as generating an import library from the 
DLL. There's no need to build libcurl yourself to do that. The 
installer automatically downloads one I prepared a long time ago 
already.

@brocolis recently prepared an updated libcurl zip with the OMF 
import library as well as 64-bit support. It also uses WinSSL 
instead of OpenSSL so using it is even easier than it was before. 
The installer has already been updated for it: 
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/installer/pull/27

With that libcurl should just work on Windows for both 32 and 64 
bits. Linux problems are basically all that remains of the 
libcurl issues.

>
> You may or may not find them at the VARY BOTTOM of downloads 
> page, and figure it out how to fit them, what flags to use etc. 
> Last but not least it's Win32 only. No links for Win64.

The installer handles downloading it.  End users don't need to 
find it themselves unless they download the dmd zip file (I still 
don't understand why anyone does that).

@brocolis wrote up a guide for how he made prepared the updated 
curl zip and put it up on the wiki. End users shouldn't need to 
do that though. It's just documented for the phobos developers. 
http://wiki.dlang.org/Curl_on_Windows