Re: libwww blocked

On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 12:13:09PM -0000, Regis Boudin wrote:
> 
> On Wed, January 2, 2008 11:02, Urs Holzer wrote:
> > They want to prevent bots from harvesting email adresses and flooding
> > publicly editable resoures such as wiki sites. Perhaps the people who
> > write those bots use libwww (because it is really easy to use) and
> > don't care about the user agent header.

BTW, you can change the user agent string by calling 
  HTLib.c::HTLib_setAppName (const char * name)

when initializing libwww within Amaya.

> Actually, wouldn't it be better to try and move away from libwww ? It
> looks pretty much unmaintained upstream, with the last official release
> over 5 years old and the last CVS commit 13 months ago.

When I looked at that at the time, the two biggest problems were:
1) Lack of caching in libcurl
2) Some asynchronous requests issues
3) Pipelining support

Of course, I don't remember anything now :) I don't know if
libcurl supports caching now. I suspect you'll end adding more
protocol awareness to libcurl frontend if you wanst to achieve
the same HTTP behavior that Amaya has today.

> >From a Debian perspective, only 4 packages still use libwww, and its
> current maintainer announced his intention to ask for removal from the
> archive. His advice is to switch to libcurl, which seems to provide a much
> nicer to use API and is actively maintained. Obviously I am willing to do
> some work on this and provide patches. I might do it anyway for the debian
> package...

Good luck with your porting project :)

-jose

Received on Thursday, 10 January 2008 15:41:14 UTC