HTTP and character encodings

[Ben Millwood]

On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 9:30 AM, Christian Maeder
<Christian.Maeder at dfki.de> wrote:
> if you remove the String instance I would need to encode my strings manually
> (and maybe worse than it is done now).

This isn't actually that hard, and particularly it would be easy to do
a better job than the current one if you used a real encoding package
like text or utf8-string.

> Which instance does the package cabal-install use?

Looks like it uses both String and ByteString in various pieces of the
code. But it would probably be a sensible idea to switch to ByteString
anyway.

> Which alternative (better maintained) packages could I use if I have to
> change my code anyway?
>
> The header of Network.HTTP contains a "Portability" saying
> "non-portable (not tested)", but the package contains a test-suite.
> Are tests (or their lack) a portability issue?

There is no standardised meaning of the Portability field, as far as I
know, so it's probably best to ignore this.

Yours,
Ben