Doesn't this assume the maintainers of both projects would be amenable to such a thing, and otherwise be perfectly in unison with regard to vision and goals?
Actually, it mainly just assumes the author knows C. If they had they could have simply taken cURL and written some wrapper functions to do the JSON query part and the syntax highlighting, then submitted their modifications. No extra project needed, no grand vision required.
> Why are you being weirdly insistent that there only exist exactly one tool for making HTTP requests on the command line?
I'm not. I'm being weirdly insistent that adding features to one good tool is better than having 10 kinda-ok tools all with different features.
Imagine if VLC or MPlayer was actually 10 different video players, all of which supported different media formats and had different features. That was actually somewhat the case for a while; kplayer supported some things, the five different GTK/Gnome players supported some things, they were all relatively buggy and playing video was always annoying. Except for VLC and MPlayer, which just did everything, and were mostly fantastic.
How did VLC and MPlayer do this? They designed their apps specifically so that they could expand in features, and allowed people to contribute new technology. They supported runtime codecs and extensions. And they had a large development and user base, and people saw the benefit in having one tool that supported as many ways possible of doing the one thing they wanted: playing a video.
Having one tool to handle all the weird uses of HTTP may not be reasonable, but having a toolkit that bundles all the weird uses of HTTP would be infinitely more useful than having to download 100 different projects just to munge HTTP requests. There are many such toolkits for other technologies. This is not a new or contentious idea.
Not only is this a contentious idea, it's positively absurd on its face. Your logic dictates that every tool with similar goals cannot be maintained separately, and that a single person or group should hold a complete monopoly on how we do any given thing in computing.
VLC and MPlayer were two of "10 different video players" when they were made, and a great many other video players, some significantly older and with higher support, were eventually supplanted by them (at least VLC, anywway).
In your little model here, that would never have happened. You'd utterly kill innovation and progress with this.
I cannot overstate how mistaken you are here, it is completely and wholly a terrible idea, at every turn. Maybe there's something I'm not getting, I certainly hope so.
I used MPlayer and VLC as an example of good development. You then say that if they had been developed the way I describe, they would not exist. But they were in fact developed the way I described. And they are not imaginary. And there is no free software monopoly on video players (not coincidentally because free software was designed to kill monopolies in the first place). If you can somehow re-state this incredibly convoluted argument maybe we can re-address it, but i'm pretty sure you only reinforced my point.
> You then say that if they had been developed the way I describe, they would not exist. But they were in fact developed the way I described.
This is literally false. They were not developed in a vacuum like you describe, but as one of a great many competing products, all of which were older. You claim they should have been folded in with other, older projects, but they weren't and because they weren't, they improved beyond those other projects, and are still here, having grown beyond the projects you claim they should have been absorbed by.
My argument was less than 50 words, if you can't parse it, I can't help you. This is also nearly a week old, has completely lost my interest, and likely the interest of everyone else on this site. Why are you still replying?
Is is that HTTPie should be merged into the cURL project?