[racket-dev] net/url and https

On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 3:47 PM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> Two minutes ago, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
>>
>> I also think that Eli's option #1 could be done without breaking
>> backward-compatibility, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort in
>> code and documentation, and I don't want to discourage him moving
>> forward with #1 by making the task harder than it has to be.
>
> Heh, I just thought about a way to do that, which is likely what
> you're thinking of:
>
>  * `net/url-unit' and `net/url-sig' stay the same.  Code that uses
>    them works as before.
>
>  * `net/url' becomes the (non-unit, of course) library that does
>    dispatching over "https" with an ssl connection.
>
> This might work, but would be very odd.  Specifically, the description
> of `net/url-unit' will need to mumble something about creating a
> result that is *not* like `net/url' in that there is no such dispatch.
>
> Backwards compatible, but IMO very ugly.  But perhaps it's worth it?

I don't have a strong opinion about which option is best.  I don't
have much code that deals with URLs at all (and let's be blunt; it's
_all_ hobby code).  And I don't understand units enough to comment on
anything involving them.

I do feel strongly that Racket should have a way to deal with https
reasonably painlessly.  I also think that Eli is right about the
awkwardness of the current interface -- in order to get the status
code from the response, I have to parse the headers myself, which
seems silly.