Daniel’s weekly report, July 1, 2022
release
I had to spend a few hours over the weekend to polish the final bits so I could put the curl 7.84.0 release out properly on Monday morning together with four new security advisories.
There have been no major release-quakes; the most serious new flaws reported seems to be some build issues related to our new magic for doing locks. Nothing serious enough to warrant any panic follow-up releases yet at least. We will most likely open the feature windows again tomorrow, Saturday.
libproxy
An almost six years old PR for adding libproxy support to curl was brought back to life and resubmitted this week.
Lots of people have voiced their support for having something like this added, so it seems there’s a demand. I am however still very skeptical about libproxy as a library and project: no docs, no tests, no CI, blocking behavior, its own (bad) URL parser, its own (bad) HTTP/1 GET function and more. (It being written in C++ may not be a problem in itself but it will keep me away from working on it.)
People say its a “default” library and “commonly used” everywhere, but I am afraid those things don’t make its problems disappear. I am afraid I cannot condone linking libproxy with curl before several of its worst problems are addressed. Doing so will only put users at risk and risk that users will end up with a (lib)curl experience.
Everyone is still capable and free to use libproxy themselves and pass in the proxy it finds to curl for use.
libproxy enthusiasts should roll up their sleeves and start fixing up the project for the benefit of all users and the ecosystem at large.
Alternatively, someone could make a new project to offer this functionality.
podcast
I participated in a podcast recording on Monday. Lots of talk about how I started, how we got here, how I develop, things about open source, about IETF, about network protocols and all that good stuff. As usual, I will let you know when it becomes available.
curl up 2022
curl up 2022 will happen on September 15, 2022. We had to cancel the in-person event we originally planned, but now we will instead run an all-virtual event in September. I will get back with more details as they unfold going forward.
We will offer t-shirts to those who first register (and attend) the event.
websockets
I try to squeeze in websockets developed in the midst of everything else and I believe I am making progress, even if I also do a lot of back and forth to rewrite parts of what I already did as I come to think of better or different ways to do it. In this first phase, I primarily want and aim to add more and more test cases for the new libcurl functions for WebSockets. Only once I have those working decently stable, I will switch over to doing something for the command line tool.
I keep pushing to the remote branch so that the CI jobs can verify that things still are okay when websockets are disabled in the build etc.
My hope is that I should be able to offer early beta tests at the end of July or so. A little depending on how much vacation I will end up taking during this month.
Corellium sponsors my WebSockets work.
Blog posts
Coming up
- continued work on WebSockets
- vacation