Daniel’s weekly report
August 26, 2022
curl up 2022
The agenda has been extended with details now and it is starting to look fine.
Uncurled
I did a live presentation on Tuesday that I called Uncurled with me talking about what people can expect when running Open Source projects and how I think you can run such proejcts (there’s a video on the page the link takes you). Of course based a lot on the contents of my book with the same name.
As a direct result of questions I received and topics that was brought to the top of my mind when doing this, I then extended the book with more contents in the week. I added a few entirely new sections and enhanced a few. I also fired up a new crontab job and now I offer a PDF version of the book, updated daily, here.
Uncurled is now 23,100 words long.
Funding
I had a great meeting with a European organization that is interested in funding and improving infrastructure Open Source projects, and curl meets the criteria. We are moving forward with some ideas on how it can and should be done so that both sides are happy and get the most out of it. Fingers crossed. I will of course give you all more details when I can and if the ducks end up in the right order.
Android follow-up
Back in April I mentioned a complicated and hard-to-debug problem one of my customers experienced with libcurl with their large volume app on Android. This has now finally turned out to be… not a problem in libcurl at all, but was found to be a flaw in adjacent code. Hooray for us.
Websockets
I am now down to only one unchecked checkbox for what I need to do in pull-request. It is looking good for a merge when the feature window opens after the coming release.
One of the reasons there is only one checkbox left is that I have postponed a few things to instead split up the work and to a subset of the work after the initial release: in particular I am thinking about adjustments for the curl tool and some more. My hope is that the initial merge will trigger some early users to try it out and give feedback so that we can smoothen out rough corners and perfect it that way - a in parallel with further development.
Corellium sponsors my WebSockets work.
Pending release
The 210th curl release is scheduled for next week. One CVE will be announced in assocation with the release. I will do a release video presentation live as usual on the Wednesday.
Blog posts
Coming up
- more websockets work and polish
- curl 7.85.0 release on Aug 31
Feedback
August 19, 2022
Coverity
After an upgrade, the code analyzer Coverity seems to have gotten this newly found ability to spot issues with time_t and 32 bit in the code and it correctly identified a problematic code section we had in SFTP. Actually present twice with minor variations, in two different backends.
Websockets
I had another productive week of improvements to the code. Out of my list of 25 bullet points listed in the PR that I have identified we need done before we can consider having reached the first milestone, I have now nailed 20 of them.
(I spent far too may hours yesterday to debug a regression in the code that made the websockets branch break HTTP/2 upgrades.)
Note quite “there” yet, but we certainly have the foundation in place, it seems to work decently and I will continue to fill in the remaining blanks in the weeks to come.
If anyone has a use case for websockets support today and wants to work with me to try out the new websockets API early, I’m very interested in getting in touch!
Corellium sponsors my WebSockets work.
Memory-leaks
I have this long-standing task to move away CI jobs from Zuul and make them run on other services instead (because zuul doesn’t work good enough) and this week I moved another few jobs: namely torture tests.
When doing this, I happened to trigger and find no less than two separate memory-leaks in exit paths in the name resolver code! Fixed now.
Everything curl
I added a whole new section to the book, explaining and describing all there is to say about tests in the curl project.
File format, how to build tests, how to run them, debug builds, test servers, different test kinds, CI jobs, autobuilds etc.
curl up
I am slowly getting the agenda for curl up 2022 done and I have emailed all speakers to get their commitments confirmed to make sure we can deliver on the promises.
There is still time and room to add more intersting stuff!
Blog posts
Coming up
- more websockets work and polish
- talking up curl up
- my “uncurled” presentation
Feedback
August 12, 2022
Happened this week
vacation
It has been several weeks since I last wrote a weekly report. I had this period of vacation mixed with a little work. It was great but now I’m back at full speed ahead and I have spent this week working hard on shrinking the amount of open issues and pull-requests. They had managed to grow in number about recently but as we reach the end of this week they seem to be down to manageable numbers again.
feature freeze
Last week curl entered feature freeze and we are aiming for a release on August 31, which makes the release cycle one week longer than usual this time. It might actually result in a record number of bugfixes for a single release if the pace keeps up.
QUIC
Stefan Eissing landed his QUIC API work in wolfSSL this week, giving yet another TLS library the ability to be used in a QUIC implementation. If the plan sticks, we should soon be able to run HTTP/3 transfers with curl using ngtcp2 powered by wolfSSL. I promise to let you know when you too can try this out!
IPFS
When I noticed a tweet by Phoronix saying “#IPFS Supported In FFmpeg 5.1, IPFS Devs Envision Support In More Open-Source Project” I decided I should just write down what I have learned about IPFS and the use of remote HTTP gateways and how I think the use of a default one is a bad idea. I figured that if how this works was a surprise to me, it might also be a surprise to others.
The reaction in the ffmpeg project was instant and a patch was posted to revert the default gateway. The follow-up discussion on that mailing list turned emotional very quickly but at least the ball is rolling now.
websockets
I haven’t worked a lot on this recently but I hope to get back up to speed and to expand the number of tests and make sure I complete the full planned API soon. I want to do an initial merge in the next feature window, which is open September 5 - 28.
The feature will be marked EXPERIMENTAL and require a special configure flag to get enabled to start with anyway so it should be fairly safe.
Corellium sponsors my WebSockets work.
Blog posts
Coming up
- websockets work
- agenda work for curl up
- create my “uncurled” presentation for the 23rd