Re: url-cache - (require 'url)

[Mark Plaksin <happy@mcplaksin.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> Maybe there's a better approach to the problem I'm trying to solve.  I want
>> to add support for ETags to nnrss in Gnus.  To do that, nnrss needs access
>> to HTTP headers.  nnrss currently uses mm-url-insert which calls
>> url-insert-file-contents.  Those seem like the right functions to use but
>> they don't provide access to the HTTP headers.
>
> Why do they seem better to you than url-retrieve (or even url-http) given
> the fact that they do not give you the info you need?

Because url-insert-file-contents does some coding-system things that I
assume are important for inserting URLs into buffers.  I don't know
anything about coding-systems.  I could write a new function that uses
url-retrieve or url-http but I'd probably have to duplicate the
coding-system parts which seems wasteful.

It also seems that other applications that want to insert the contents of a
URL could benefit from having access to HTTP headers.