[phobos] WTF is curl doing in Phobos???

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, August 29, 2013 10:04:52 Don Clugston wrote:
> Now I cannot even build Phobos without libcurl.
> 
> I'm sorry, but this is insane.
> 
> I use curl with D professionally every day, and I just don't think curl is
> anywhere near mature enough to be in a standard library.
> 
> The implementation in Phobos seems very naive, and seems unaware of the
> shortcomings of curl. For example, curl can't handle a user name with a
> colon in it. (Some of our clients do indeed have user names with colons in
> them). We've found some very nasty bugs in its support for simultaneous
> downloads. It behaves badly with certain types of FTP servers. Etc.
> 
> Including it in Phobos implies a level of support that we cannot possibly
> provide.
> 
> Can we please move this into Deimos where it belongs?

Well, std.net.curl has no business in Deimos, because Deimos is purely for C 
bindings (though etc.c.curl could go in Deimos), whereas std.net.curl is a D 
wrapper which adds functionality.

However, regardless of the maturity of libcurl, we clearly have been having 
problems with std.net.curl due to the fact that Windows doesn't come with 
libcurl, and we don't distribute it with Phobos. I think that it's pretty 
clear at this point that if std.net.curl were proposed now, it would likely 
not get accepted. So, the question then becomes whether removing it is worth 
the breakage and where it would go if we remove it, since we have no official 
place for anything like it. But maybe that means that someone (like its 
original developer) will have to just own the project at that point rather 
than having it be anywhere official.

Personally, I'm all for removing it given the problems that we've been having, 
but I don't know what the consensus on that would be. Walter doesn't like the 
fact that it's there, and he's usually the biggest opponent to breakage, so if 
he agrees that we can remove it, then I expect that there's a good chance that 
that's what we'll do.

- Jonathan M Davis