This was committed presumably to work around bug #588771 (strict aliasing compiler warnings):

 commit 4e6fcd2345d208d029e46286c141a2f6b4ea5d7d
 Author: Edward Hervey <bilboed@bilboed.com>
 Date:   Mon Jul 27 18:44:45 2009 +0200

    soup: Use "GET" instead of SOUP_METHOD_GET. Fixes build (...)
    (...)

diff --git a/ext/soup/gstsouphttpsrc.c b/ext/soup/gstsouphttpsrc.c
index c50fd3e..18b39b1 100644
--- a/ext/soup/gstsouphttpsrc.c
+++ b/ext/soup/gstsouphttpsrc.c
@@ -1101,7 +1101,7 @@ gst_soup_http_src_parse_status (SoupMessage * msg, GstSoupHTTPSrc * src)
 static gboolean
 gst_soup_http_src_build_message (GstSoupHTTPSrc * src)
 {
-  src->msg = soup_message_new (SOUP_METHOD_GET, src->location);
+  src->msg = soup_message_new ("GET", src->location);
   if (!src->msg) {
     GST_ELEMENT_ERROR (src, RESOURCE, OPEN_READ,
         (NULL), ("Error parsing URL \"%s\"", src->location));


I'm not convinced this change is technically entirely correct, and think we should try to fix this differently somehow so it doesn't come back to bite us in future.

In particular, the way the API works:

 - libsoup might now or in future rely on the
   first argument to be an interned string

 - libsoup might now or in future rely on the
   exported symbol _SOUP_METHOD_GET having been
   initialised to a valid, possibly interned,
   string after soup_message_new() has been called

 - libsoup might now or in future rely on being able
   to do direct pointer comparisons between the
   method string passed and e.g. _SOUP_METHOD_GET

I don't know if any of this is actually used, but that's the way the API works, and we shouldn't just ignore that (and given the commit message I'm fairly sure this wasn't checked). Until libsoup git is changed to something like #define SOUP_METHOD_GET "GET" I'm tempted to think there's a reason for all this inlining and variable initialising etc.

Since I haven't seen the warning myself with the version of libsoup that I have, it'd be nice if someone who else who did have the warning could look for a better fix.