Re: [Patch] Support HTTP/2 in HTTP client

[Derek Upham <derek_upham@mailfence.com>]

Okay, I figured it out.  In that particular chunk of code I was 
calling out to Curl to do the heavy lifting: “(run/port (curl 
--silent --head ,source-url))”.  Curl negotiates HTTP/2 and dumps 
the header information:

  HTTP/2 200 
  date: Tue, 07 Apr 2020 14:22:37 GMT
  content-type: audio/mpeg
  content-length: 31411830

The code then passed the response port to the existing 
“read-response” function in the web/response module, to turn this 
text into data objects.

That means this isn’t a “support HTTP/2 connections” change, it’s 
just a “support parsing HTTP/2 responses” change.

However, sometime during all of this I figured out how to get the 
system-installed extensions working with my personal build of 
Guile, so the TLS extension now works and I can cut Curl out of 
this code and just use “http-head”.  We can drop this patch.

Thanks,

Derek

Derek Upham <derek_upham@mailfence.com> writes:

> I made this particular tweak because Guile 2.2’s HTTP/1.1 client 
> requests were getting back an HTTP/2 response from a podcast 
> server, and choking.  (The use of Google’s URL was just an 
> example to show the format of the HTTP response header.)   Let’s 
> drop the 
> patch for now.  I’ll try disabling it locally and see whether I 
> can still reproduce it.  Given the amount of redirects that 
> media 
> website backends do, it’s possible that I’ll never come across 
> the problem again.
>
> Derek
>
> Tristan Colgate <tcolgate@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> http/2 is a substantially different protocol, it will take
>> considerable effort to support it, guile's client should only 
>> be
>> offering http/1.1 to the server.
>>
>> On Tue, 31 Mar 2020 at 15:49, Derek Upham 
>> <derek_upham@mailfence.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Companies like Google now respond to HTTP requests with HTTP 
>>> 2.
>>> For example:
>>>
>>>   curl --silent --head https://www.google.com
>>>
>>> returns the first line
>>>
>>>   HTTP/2 200
>>>
>>> The Guile HTTP client code expects a “HTTP/x.y” structure, and
>>> treats this as an error.  This patch recognizes and handles
>>> “HTTP/2” on input and output.  HTTP version numbers don’t
>>> proliferate quickly, so the code uses a brute force approach 
>>> for
>>> now.
>>>
>>>
>>> Derek
>>>
>>> --
>>> Derek Upham
>>> derek_upham@mailfence.com


-- 
Derek Upham
derek_upham@mailfence.com