[Haskell-cafe] Contributing to http-conduit

[Michael Snoyman]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 8:31 AM, Myles C. Maxfield
<myles.maxfield at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1. Oops - I overlooked the fact that the redirectCount attribute of a
> Request is exported (it isn't listed on the documentation probably because
> the constructor itself isn't exported. This seems like a flaw in
> Haddock...). Silly me. No need to export httpRaw.
>
> 2. I think that stuffing many arguments into the 'http' function is ugly.
> However, I'm not sure that the number of arguments to 'http' could ever
> reach an unreasonably large amount. Perhaps I have bad foresight, but I
> personally feel that adding cookies to the http request will be the last
> thing that we will need to add. Putting a bound on this growth of arguments

I completely disagree here. If we'd followed this approach, rawBody,
decompress, redirectCount, and checkStatus all would have been
arguments. There's a reason we use a settings data type[1] here.

[1] http://www.yesodweb.com/blog/2011/10/settings-types

> makes me more willing to think about this option. On the other hand, using a
> BrowserAction to modify internal state is very elegant. Which approach do
> you think is best? I think I'm leaning toward the upper-level Browser module
> idea.
>
> If there was to be a higher-level HTTP library, I would argue that the
> redirection code should be moved into it, and the only high-level function
> that the Network.HTTP.Conduit module would export is 'http' (or httpRaw).
> What do you think about this?

I actually don't want to move the redirection code out from where it
is right now. I think that redirection *is* a basic part of HTTP. I'd
be more in favor of just bundling cookies in with the current API,
possibly with the IORef approach I'd mentioned (unless someone wants
to give a different idea). Having a single API that provides both
high-level and low-level approaches seems like a win to me.

Michael