status

useful, but probably has some buglets lingering in rarely exercised
code paths.

intro

this is a http library, and simple sample http download client.
the library supports both reading & writing requests & responses.

some features:

• ssl (using inferno's ssl device)
• can do gzip/deflate negotiation for requests

• supports low-level operations (reading/writing request/response)
  as well as high-level operations (pass request, get file descriptor
  to read response from (hiding intricacies of ssl, deflate and/or
  http chunks)
  

• supports http 1.0/1.1 and versionless "0.9"
• can request through proxy

download

get the latest version from:

http://www.ueber.net/code/r/http

install

make sure you have $ROOT set, now "mk install" to compile and install
the files.

when building from within inferno, insert SYSHOST=Inferno and ROOT=
in the mk invocations to override the values in the mkconfig.

licence & author

this code is in the public domain, written by mechiel lukkien,
reachable at mechiel@ueber.net.

todo:

• split some of mhttp.m into an httpclient library, with higher-level
  functionality (e.g. following redirects, handling range responses).
  rewrite hget to use it.
  

• lib: don't reinvent url parsing?  but use (one of the two?) url
  libs in inferno.
  

• lib: rename it from mhttp to http, once i have modified all my
  local programs to use this new lib (instead of an older version)
  

• lib: use factotum to deal with auth requests?

• lib: do ssl better, e.g. with verifying certificates.  but that
  is a more generic inferno problem.  same with problem that
  non-"connection-close" connections hang until timeout (ssl libs
  read() is like a readn(), and we use bufio so more data is requested
  then is present).
  

• lib: check ndb to see if a proxy should be used, not per request?
  that means all programs using http lib get proxy stuff for free,
  without having to set anything.  but cannot be disabled either...
  

• lib: for ssl, use CONNECT to talk to the remote host?

• write manual page for library? once it stabilizes

• lib: document somewhere that using "accept-encoding: deflate"
  won't work with some webservers since those webservers return rfc1951
  deflate data, instead of rfc1950 zlib.
  

• hget: reinstate -n for allowing redirs, and -R for sending referers.