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Re: Pipelining is a pain, can we ditch it now?

From: Daniel Stenberg <daniel_at_haxx.se>
Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2018 13:04:58 +0200 (CEST)

On Sat, 30 Jun 2018, Daniel Stenberg wrote:

> HTTP Pipelining was never enabled by default by the large desktop browsers
> due to all the issues with it. Both Firefox and Chrome have also dropped
> Pipelining support entirely since a long time back now. We are in fact over
> time becoming more and more lonely in supporting pipelining.

Here's a plan on how to deprecate pipelining support from libcurl!

1. In 7.62.0 (release planned to happen in September 2018), we add code that
ignores the "enable pipeline" option setting). The *setopt() function would
still return "OK" though so the application couldn't tell that this is
happening.

Users who truly need pipelining from that version will need to modify the code
(ever so slightly) and rebuild.

2. Six months later, in sync with the planned release happen in April 2019,
(might be 7.66.0), assuming no major riots have occurred due to this in the
mean time, we rip out the pipelining code. It is in the order of 1000 lines of
libcurl code.

Left to answer: should the *setopt() function start to return error when these
options are set to be able to tell when they're trying to use options that are
no longer around or should we maintain behavior as much as possible?

Is this plan compatible with our API/ABI guarantees?

Yes in fact it is. Pipelining is and was always just a "wish" from the
application's perspective and it can never really be guaranteed to happen.
From an application's perspective, this just makes the wish never come true
over the wire.

Appeal?

If you want to object to this plan and decision, please bring it up here on
the curl-library mailing list and explain to us why your use case breaks
terribly by this action with no useful work-arounds.

Since this is now the second item on the "to be removed" list (axTLS being the
first), I figure maybe I should setup a page somewhere to help us keep track
of them...

- As always, your input is appreciated!

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se
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Received on 2018-07-01