Re: NSURLProtocol and WebDAV

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 14 Jan 2011, at 19:44, Philippe Roussel wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to use NSURLConnection instead of NSURLHandle to access a
> WebDAV server (mainly because NSURLConnection seems to be the future).

Well, it's the direction Apple has gone ... that doesn't mean it's better in 
GNUstep.

> WebDAV only adds new methods to http so implementing a WebDAVURLProtocol
> from scratch would mean a lot of code duplication. On the other hand,
> subclassing _NSHTTPURLProtocol seems to be difficult as it is mostly
> hidden.
> As the only thing that needs to be modified is the list of accepted
> methods, I propose the following patch to allow the use of WebDAV
> specific methods.
> 
> Would that be acceptable ?


If you want to use NSURLConnection for Apple compatibility, then your code 
needs to work with the Apple Foundation, so you can't change the behavior of 
_NSHTTPURLProtocol (though of course if the GNUstep implementation differs from 
the Apple one we can change it to match).  As a general rule we don't want to 
introduce incompatibilities between Apple and GNUstep, so  I think the answer 
is 'no', it's not acceptable to add methods in _NSHTTPURLProtocol unless 
Apple's implementation already supports them (you could write some testcases to 
find out).

If you want to use NSURLHandle, that's a bit different ... since Apple have 
already deprecated that class, we don't need to worry about compatibility so 
much (the NSURLHandle code already has extensions to make it reasonably usable 
since the original API was too limited).