Switch from httr to httr2

[pitkant]

eurostat package currently depends on httr (httr (>= 1.4.0)) but on httr website it is stated that

httr is superseded: only changes necessary to keep it on CRAN will be made. We recommend using httr2 instead.

Within some time frame it would be useful to switch from httr to httr2 as httr2 is obviously under active development and therefore better supported. Some new features of httr2:

The main differences with httr are (from Vaarle van Leemput's LinkedIn post:

• httr2 has a pipeable API
• there’s a single function now to perform a request and fetch the result: 𝚛𝚎𝚚_𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚖(). You can now create and modify a request without performing it too (e.g. with 𝚛𝚎𝚚_𝚍𝚛𝚢_𝚛𝚞𝚗())
• HTTP errors are now R errors, super convenient as the errors will just nicely display in the console
• Better management of secrets
• You can cache cacheable results
• Better OAuth support
• You can automatically retry requests with 𝚛𝚎𝚚_𝚛𝚎𝚝𝚛𝚢()

However I don't think this switch is very urgent as superseded does not mean that httr would be deprecated. On the contrary, it is stated that necessary changes will be made if it was at risk of being booted from CRAN. httr2 is not a new package but in 2022 it was described as an "experimental successor to httr" by its author Hadley Wickham. Although I think he didn't mean the package being experimental as in being unstable (the core functions are probably going to be very stable and dependable) but more like the package is still getting new functionalities and is under active development.

It wouldn't probably be a big task to replace all httr function calls with httr2 calls but the question here is whether we want to do it immediately or wait a bit. What do others think?

[pitkant]

Now merged into v4-dev, feedback very much welcome

[pitkant]

Closed with the CRAN release of package version 4.0.0