IRI and IDN support; libcurl blocked? (was: Re: libwww blocked)

At 21:13 08/01/02, 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.
>
>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.
>
>>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...

Two points:

1) libcurl is also mentioned on
http://johannburkard.de/blog/www/spam/The-top-10-spam-bot-user-agents-you-MUST-block-NOW.html,
so we can expect it to produce the same 'refusal by server' problems
as libwww.

2) In the current Amaya libwww code base supports,
   Internationalized Domain Names (IDN, this works at least
   on some systems, not necessarily on all) and
   IRIs (Internationalized Resource Identifiers, this should work on
   all systems). libcurl didn't support these the last time I checked.
   However, a student of mine implemented these last year, and
   I would be glad to contribute the code. It would be a pity if
   switching from libwww to libcurl would remove support for IRIs
   and IDNs.

Regards,    Martin.


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp

Received on Thursday, 3 January 2008 06:04:23 UTC