[gdal-dev] Anyone has already forgotten the /vsicurl/ prefix?

[Even Rouault]

Hi,

I suspect that almost every GDAL user, even the most experienced, has 
made the mistake of typing "gdalinfo https://example.com/my.tif" instead 
of "gdalinfo /vsicurl/https://example.com/my.tif". Both commands work, 
but the first one triggers the HTTP pseudo-driver which downloads the 
entire file into memory before passing it to the GeoTIFF driver, while 
the second reads it in chunks.

I would be inclined to modify the GDALOpen() logic with the following 
tweak: if the passed filename starts with "http://" or "https://", 
automatically prepend "/vsicurl/", unless the string has query 
parameters. That restriction about not having query parameters is 
because in most of the cases this is for dynamically generated resources 
that don't support range requests.

For users really wanting to go through the HTTP pseudo-driver, we'd 
modify it to accept a "HTTP:" prefix before the URL or it would trigger 
if using the "-if HTTP" argument of command line utilities (or 
allowed_drivers = ["HTTP"] in the API)

So this change wouldn't be fully backwards compatible, but I feel it 
would still make more people happy than unhappy.

Thoughts?

Even

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