Network.URL

[Iavor Diatchki]

Hi,
I agree that there is overlap between the two.  I specifically wrote
Network.URL because of some problems that I encountered while trying
to use Network.URI on a project. My biggest problem was that
Network.URI does not abstract away from representation issues, so one
runs into all the usual PHP type of problems like forgetting to URL
encode/decode, or doing it multiple times. It is (alsmost) like just
working with Strings.  Here is an example:

show (URI "http:" Nothing "my?path" "" "")
"http:my?path"

which is incorrect in a number of different ways.

Network.URL uses a different approach where the basic design principle
is that programmers work with URLs as ordinary Haskell values, and
then there are functions to convert to/from Strings/Bytes, which take
care of representation issues. Here is an example:

exportURL (URL HostRelative "my?path" [])
"/my%3fpath"

So, my vote (unsurprisingly) would be to obsolete/replace Network.URI.
 I am a bit worried that this might break a lot of code.  On the other
hand, recently we have been a lot more strict about specifying the
precise dependencies for packages, so perhaps there won't be much of
an issue?

-Iavor


On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 1:21 AM, Simon Marlow<simonmar at microsoft.com> wrote:
> Hi Iavor,
>
> I just noticed the url package on Hackage.  There seems to be a lot of overlap between this and Network.URI in the network package.  Perhaps they should be merged, or one of them deprecated?
>
> Cheers,
>        Simon
>
>