[Haskell-cafe] ANN: HTTPbis / HTTP-4000.x package available

[Sigbjorn Finne]

Hi,

I guess it's time to publish more widely the availability of a 
modernization of
the venerable and trusted HTTP package, which I've been working on
off&on for a while.

Bunch of changes, but the headline new feature of this new version
is the parameterization of the representation of payloads in both HTTP
requests and responses. Two new representations are supported, strict 
and lazy
ByteStrings. Some people have reported quietly pleasing speedups as a result
of this change. (If they want to report numbers, please do..)

Another change/fix in this release is the _alleged_ fix to the 
long-standing bug
in the use of  absolute URIs vs absolute paths in requests (for 
non-proxied and
proxied use.) Give it a go..

Notice that the HTTP-4000.x version will require you to make some
modifications to your existing HTTP-using code -- I've tried to keep the API
backwards compatible minimal despite the change in functionality and
underlying types. If you do not want to deal with this right away, please
introduce a <4000 dependency on the HTTP package in your .cabal files.

I've also taken on the maintainership of the package, with the highly 
esteemed
Bjorn Bingert no longer having the usual abundance of cycles to look after
it (hope I'm not misrepresenting facts here, Bjorn!) However, I've yet to
gain access to  www.haskell.org and update http://www.haskell.org/http,
so for now you may pick up a new version the lib via

   http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/HTTP

GIT repo for HTTP-4000  / HTTPbis is here

    git://code.galois.com/HTTPbis.git

enjoy
--sigbjorn