Configure HTTPS/libcurl by default because it's now needed to access CRAM reference registry

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#605 opened on Oct 13, 2017 5 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty: 3/5
Estimated time: 1-2 days
Newbie friendliness: 35/100

Issue type: Feature
Clarity: Mostly clear
Activity status: Stale
Tech stack: c
Domain: networking

Research direction

Start with the ./configure path described in the issue and inspect how libcurl support is currently enabled or disabled. Check the CRAM Reference Registry access path and existing configuration tests, if present. Done means HTTPS access to the registry works by default while users can still opt out of libcurl support.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Per @tk2, EBI recently began switching all www connections, including to the CRAM Reference Registry, to HTTPS. This is good even though the references are public data, because it helps to ensure the data can't be corrupted in-flight.

However, it means that htslib now requires HTTPS support (i.e. libcurl, ./configure --enable-libcurl) in order to access the CRAM Reference Registry. Otherwise (by default!), viewing a CRAM file fails with a cryptic error "Failed to populate reference for id ..."

My suggestion therefore would be to change libcurl from opt-in to opt-out.

Dominant language: C
Stars: 950
Forks: 475
Avg merge: 3d 13h
Merged PRs (30d): 11

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