Re: with-url

[Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Anyway, progress on the with-url branch has been much more rapid than I
thought it would be, and it "basically works" now: You can use it to
browse the web.

What's left of the main part is to finish implementing the header/data
encoding framework and do some quality assurance on form submission.

I've reused some components of the old URL library, like the cookie and
cache bits, but I just discovered that the url-cache library is
basically ... er...  not very good.  That is, it doesn't implement
anything like a traditional web browser cache, with lifetime management
and heeding the required caching headers.  (In addition, it's not very,
er, privacy conscious, as it'll basically record every site you've been
to, and every thing you've looked at, in plain text.)  So I'll be
implementing a new cache, too.  *sigh*

My plan is then to merge this with master in a few weeks (well, not
really a merge, but more of a patch set), and then it'll be in Emacs
26.1.  And then we can mark url-retrieve and all the rest as obsolete in
Emacs 27, after with-url has grown the bits that people feel they need
to do the switchover.

In particular, with-url does not implement schemes like imap:, irc:,
news: and ldap: and all the other things that nobody uses any more.
(And most of which have been broken in Emacs for something like a
decade, I think: See the bug tracker for details.)

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no