Re: GIOChannel subclassing in libsoup

[Dan Winship <danw gnome org>]

Tor Lillqvist wrote:
>> Unfortunately it seems that the only related API usable from C is
>> "WinHTTP", which, as the name indicates, only handles HTTP (optionally
>> with SSL). I didn't find any Microsoft API to wrap SSL around an
>> arbitrary TCP connection,
> 
> One thing that is unclear to me is: is libsoup for HTTP -style
> protocols only (as it says in the README file, and on
> http://live.gnome.org/LibSoup), or can it also be used for generic
> socket connections?

It is an HTTP library, however SoupSocket is part of its public API for
now. (I considered hiding it for the 2.4 ABI break, but too many
different libsoup-using apps were using it for too many different
things, and then even the gvfs ftp backend ended up using it just
because there's no better glib-ish networking library already available
in the GNOME desktop release).

Assuming that (a) "gnio" (g-network-io) ever gets written and put into
the platform, and (b) libsoup has another ABI break at some point after
that, then SoupSocket, SoupAddress, etc, would go away.

> If libsoup is for HTTP only, then if one wanted to use more "native"
> API on Windows, the thing to do would be to replace libsoup in whole
> with a thin wrapper around WinHTTP? Nah, probably not worth the
> effort.

Yeah, it wouldn't even be all that thin with all of the datatype
marshalling you'd have to do. And you'd have to reimplement async
sessions via threads, etc, etc. Plus then we'd have two sets of HTTP
bugs to deal with, which would be no good at all.

-- Dan