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

[Scott]

Embarrassingly, I've caught myself looking into the documentation for 
/vsihttp/ on more than one occasion. It might be cool to have it, 
possibly with its own set of --co options.

But, yeah, the new default action you outlined sounds good!

Scott

On 3/27/26 10:08, Even Rouault via gdal-dev wrote:
> 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
>