<div dir="ltr">Same confusion for me, even worse when you start chaining vsis, a /vsis3 with /vsizip for example, which should come first?<br>if we can read a zip over a storage, maybe we should just read it without too much docs readings?</div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Mar 27, 2026 at 4:45 PM Scott via gdal-dev <<a href="mailto:gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org">gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Embarrassingly, I've caught myself looking into the documentation for <br>
/vsihttp/ on more than one occasion. It might be cool to have it, <br>
possibly with its own set of --co options.<br>
<br>
But, yeah, the new default action you outlined sounds good!<br>
<br>
Scott<br>
<br>
On 3/27/26 10:08, Even Rouault via gdal-dev wrote:<br>
> Hi,<br>
> <br>
> I suspect that almost every GDAL user, even the most experienced, has <br>
> made the mistake of typing "gdalinfo <a href="https://example.com/my.tif" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://example.com/my.tif</a>" instead <br>
> of "gdalinfo /vsicurl/<a href="https://example.com/my.tif" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://example.com/my.tif</a>". Both commands work, <br>
> but the first one triggers the HTTP pseudo-driver which downloads the <br>
> entire file into memory before passing it to the GeoTIFF driver, while <br>
> the second reads it in chunks.<br>
> <br>
> I would be inclined to modify the GDALOpen() logic with the following <br>
> tweak: if the passed filename starts with "http://" or "https://", <br>
> automatically prepend "/vsicurl/", unless the string has query <br>
> parameters. That restriction about not having query parameters is <br>
> because in most of the cases this is for dynamically generated resources <br>
> that don't support range requests.<br>
> <br>
> For users really wanting to go through the HTTP pseudo-driver, we'd <br>
> modify it to accept a "HTTP:" prefix before the URL or it would trigger <br>
> if using the "-if HTTP" argument of command line utilities (or <br>
> allowed_drivers = ["HTTP"] in the API)<br>
> <br>
> So this change wouldn't be fully backwards compatible, but I feel it <br>
> would still make more people happy than unhappy.<br>
> <br>
> Thoughts?<br>
> <br>
> Even<br>
> <br>
<br>
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