(This mail is one of several in my series "it is time to reconsider decisions
made in the past and make new ones for the future", stay tuned! ;-)

One year ago, or more, when we spoke of how a perfect library for URL
transfers could look like we talked about a rather low level interface that
would hide the transport layer stuff but that would leave much to the
application. We talked about not having to use callbacks but instead offer
"exported" socket file descriptors so that applicatins could select()
themselves.

Back-and-forthing a lot I settled on a set of functions that could make such
an interface work. I also decided that a higher level layer (dubbed the easy
interface) would probably still be what many applications (such as curl)
would like and use. Since curl used to be, and probably still is, the biggest
user of libcurl I stressed the easy interface part and in May 2000 the first
curl beta using this new library interface was thrown out to the public.

Since then, the "low level" interface has remained a vision and a dream. The
<curl/curl.h> header file defines a set of prototypes that were meant to be
part of the interface. Some items in the interface have never been defined
(alas, it doesn't work) and I've never received much more than some
half-hearted questions about features that the low level interface would
provide. I think history has proved the easy interface turned out useful (I
base this on the - small but growing - amount of applications using libcurl).

Now, given the bright ideas posted regarding the upcoming "persistant
connections" support I have to ask myself and users of libcurl:

        Is there any point in keeping any (plans of a) low level?

The answer to this question will control how I will need to go ahead and make
persistant connections work. More about the designing of that in an upcoming
mail.

-- 
  Daniel Stenberg -- curl project maintainer -- http://curl.haxx.se/
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