[Haskell-cafe] Contributing to http-conduit

[Myles C. Maxfield]

To: Michael Snoyman, author and maintainer of http-conduit
CC: haskell-cafe

Hello!

I am interested in contributing to the http-conduit library. I've been
using it for a little while and reading through its source, but have felt
that it could be improved with two features:

   - Allowing the caller to know the final URL that ultimately resulted in
   the HTTP Source. Because httpRaw is not exported, the caller can't even
   re-implement the redirect-following code themselves. Ideally, the caller
   would be able to know not only the final URL, but also the entire chain of
   URLs that led to the final request. I was thinking that it would be even
   cooler if the caller could be notified of these redirects as they happen in
   another thread. There are a couple ways to implement this that I have been
   thinking about:
      - A straightforward way would be to add a [W.Ascii] to the type of
      Response, and getResponse can fill in this extra field.
getResponse already
      knows about the Request so it can tell if the response should be
gunzipped.
      - It would be nice for the caller to be able to know in real time
      what URLs the request is being redirected to. A possible way to do this
      would be for the 'http' function to take an extra argument of type (Maybe
      (Control.Concurrent.Chan W.Ascii)) which httpRaw can push URLs
into. If the
      caller doesn't want to use this variable, they can simply pass Nothing.
      Otherwise, the caller can create an IO thread which reads the Chan until
      some termination condition is met (Perhaps this will change the
type of the
      extra argument to (Maybe (Chan (Maybe W.Ascii)))). I like this solution,
      though I can see how it could be considered too heavyweight.
   - Making the redirection aware of cookies. There are redirects around
   the web where the first URL returns a Set-Cookie header and a 3xx code
   which redirects to another site that expects the cookie that the first HTTP
   transaction set. I propose to add an (IORef to a Data.Set of Cookies) to
   the Manager datatype, letting the Manager act as a cookie store as well as
   a repository of available TCP connections. httpRaw could deal with the
   cookie store. Network.HTTP.Types does not declare a Cookie datatype, so I
   would probably be adding one. I would probably take it directly from
   Network.HTTP.Cookie.

I'd be happy to do both of these things, but I'm hoping for your input on
how to go about this endeavor. Are these features even good to be pursuing?
Should I be going about this entirely differently?

Thanks,
Myles C. Maxfield

P.S. I'm curious about the lack of Network.URI throughout
Network.HTTP.Conduit. Is there a particular design decision that led you to
use raw ascii strings?
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