3 ms·

I think I understand what you're saying, but all it would be is a change of ownership/packaging. httpie is only an interface to lower level libraries which alre

I think I understand what you're saying, but all it would be is a change of ownership/packaging. httpie is only an interface to lower level libraries which already exist (requests and therefore urllib3). Whether it's an interface to requests or to libcurl matters fairly little. It'd be quite a drag if it were to libcurl in fact because syntax highlighting would be a lot harder, for example.

peterwwillis 10y ago
"all it would be" is a gigantic wealth of new functionality that requests/urllib3 does not have (compare libcurl and urllib3 features), along with greater support, developer base, test coverage, user base, and lower tco. httpie gains a wealth of advantages and cURL gets syntax highlighting. It's hard to overstate how advantageous to httpie it would be.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  You are extremely confused at which level it is beneficial to merge projects. You don't simplify things by going from one popular lib to another, especially when they both have legitimate use cases. Requests is one of Python's most highly regarded libs and a very popular one at that. Httpie is not its only user. And what you are describing is not a simple process. Gaining tests and features (what features anyway?) is not good enough for it.
  - peterwwillis 10y ago
    > You are extremely confused at which level it is beneficial to merge projects. Not really, since if you read my comments I suggested they could have been merged into cURL three years ago (after starting four years ago). It wouldn't even be a new project, it would simply be an add-on tool. And that's the point.
    - dimino 10y ago
      Can you restate your thesis? Is is that HTTPie should be merged into the cURL project?
      - peterwwillis 10y ago
        > they could have been merged into cURL three years ago (after starting four years ago) > If this was implemented with libcurl and bundled with cURL > httpie gains a wealth of advantages > along with greater support, developer base, test coverage, user base, and lower tco > and cURL gets syntax highlighting
        dimino 10y ago
        Doesn't this assume the maintainers of both projects would be amenable to such a thing, and otherwise be perfectly in unison with regard to vision and goals?
        peterwwillis 10y ago
        Actually, it mainly just assumes the author knows C. If they had they could have simply taken cURL and written some wrapper functions to do the JSON query part and the syntax highlighting, then submitted their modifications. No extra project needed, no grand vision required.
        dimino 10y ago
        Well no, it assumes what I said, what you said, and a bunch of other things. Why are you being weirdly insistent that there only exist exactly one tool for making HTTP requests on the command line?
        peterwwillis 10y ago
        > Why are you being weirdly insistent that there only exist exactly one tool for making HTTP requests on the command line? I'm not. I'm being weirdly insistent that adding features to one good tool is better than having 10 kinda-ok tools all with different features. Imagine if VLC or MPlayer was actually 10 different video players, all of which supported different media formats and had different features. That was actually somewhat the case for a while; kplayer supported some things, the five different GTK/Gnome players supported some things, they were all relatively buggy and playing video was always annoying. Except for VLC and MPlayer, which just did everything, and were mostly fantastic. How did VLC and MPlayer do this? They designed their apps specifically so that they could expand in features, and allowed people to contribute new technology. They supported runtime codecs and extensions. And they had a large development and user base, and people saw the benefit in having one tool that supported as many ways possible of doing the one thing they wanted: playing a video. Having one tool to handle all the weird uses of HTTP may not be reasonable, but having a toolkit that bundles all the weird uses of HTTP would be infinitely more useful than having to download 100 different projects just to munge HTTP requests. There are many such toolkits for other technologies. This is not a new or contentious idea.

peterwwillis 10y ago

"all it would be" is a gigantic wealth of new functionality that requests/urllib3 does not have (compare libcurl and urllib3 features), along with greater support, developer base, test coverage, user base, and lower tco. httpie gains a wealth of advantages and cURL gets syntax highlighting. It's hard to overstate how advantageous to httpie it would be.

scrollaway 10y ago
You are extremely confused at which level it is beneficial to merge projects. You don't simplify things by going from one popular lib to another, especially when they both have legitimate use cases. Requests is one of Python's most highly regarded libs and a very popular one at that. Httpie is not its only user. And what you are describing is not a simple process. Gaining tests and features (what features anyway?) is not good enough for it.
- peterwwillis 10y ago
  > You are extremely confused at which level it is beneficial to merge projects. Not really, since if you read my comments I suggested they could have been merged into cURL three years ago (after starting four years ago). It wouldn't even be a new project, it would simply be an add-on tool. And that's the point.
  - dimino 10y ago
    Can you restate your thesis? Is is that HTTPie should be merged into the cURL project?
    - peterwwillis 10y ago
      > they could have been merged into cURL three years ago (after starting four years ago) > If this was implemented with libcurl and bundled with cURL > httpie gains a wealth of advantages > along with greater support, developer base, test coverage, user base, and lower tco > and cURL gets syntax highlighting
      - dimino 10y ago
        Doesn't this assume the maintainers of both projects would be amenable to such a thing, and otherwise be perfectly in unison with regard to vision and goals?
        peterwwillis 10y ago
        Actually, it mainly just assumes the author knows C. If they had they could have simply taken cURL and written some wrapper functions to do the JSON query part and the syntax highlighting, then submitted their modifications. No extra project needed, no grand vision required.
        dimino 10y ago
        Well no, it assumes what I said, what you said, and a bunch of other things. Why are you being weirdly insistent that there only exist exactly one tool for making HTTP requests on the command line?
        peterwwillis 10y ago
        > Why are you being weirdly insistent that there only exist exactly one tool for making HTTP requests on the command line? I'm not. I'm being weirdly insistent that adding features to one good tool is better than having 10 kinda-ok tools all with different features. Imagine if VLC or MPlayer was actually 10 different video players, all of which supported different media formats and had different features. That was actually somewhat the case for a while; kplayer supported some things, the five different GTK/Gnome players supported some things, they were all relatively buggy and playing video was always annoying. Except for VLC and MPlayer, which just did everything, and were mostly fantastic. How did VLC and MPlayer do this? They designed their apps specifically so that they could expand in features, and allowed people to contribute new technology. They supported runtime codecs and extensions. And they had a large development and user base, and people saw the benefit in having one tool that supported as many ways possible of doing the one thing they wanted: playing a video. Having one tool to handle all the weird uses of HTTP may not be reasonable, but having a toolkit that bundles all the weird uses of HTTP would be infinitely more useful than having to download 100 different projects just to munge HTTP requests. There are many such toolkits for other technologies. This is not a new or contentious idea.