438 lines
12 KiB
Markdown
438 lines
12 KiB
Markdown
How curl Became Like This
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=========================
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Towards the end of 1996, Daniel Stenberg was spending time writing an IRC bot
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for an Amiga related channel on EFnet. He then came up with the idea to make
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currency-exchange calculations available to Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
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users. All the necessary data were published on the Web; he just needed to
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automate their retrieval.
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1996
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----
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On November 11, 1996 the Brazilian developer Rafael Sagula wrote and released
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HttpGet version 0.1.
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Daniel extended this existing command-line open-source tool. After a few minor
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adjustments, it did just what he needed. The first release with Daniel's
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additions was 0.2, released on December 17, 1996. Daniel quickly became the
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new maintainer of the project.
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1997
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----
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HttpGet 0.3 was released in January 1997 and now it accepted HTTP URLs on the
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command line.
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HttpGet 1.0 was released on April 8 1997 with brand new HTTP proxy support.
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We soon found and fixed support for getting currencies over GOPHER. Once FTP
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download support was added, the name of the project was changed and urlget 2.0
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was released in August 1997. The http-only days were already passed.
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Version 2.2 was released on August 14 1997 and introduced support to build for
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and run on Windows and Solaris.
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November 24 1997: Version 3.1 added FTP upload support.
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Version 3.5 added support for HTTP POST.
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1998
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----
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February 4: urlget 3.10
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February 9: urlget 3.11
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March 14: urlget 3.12 added proxy authentication.
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The project slowly grew bigger. With upload capabilities, the name was once
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again misleading and a second name change was made. On March 20, 1998 curl 4
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was released. (The version numbering from the previous names was kept.)
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(Unrelated to this project a company called Curl Corporation registered a US
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trademark on the name "CURL" on May 18 1998. That company had then already
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registered the curl.com domain back in November of the previous year. All this
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was revealed to us much later.)
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SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library.
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August: first announcement of curl on freshmeat.net.
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October: with the curl 4.9 release and the introduction of cookie support,
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curl was no longer released under the GPL license. Now we are at 4000 lines of
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code, we switched over to the MPL license to restrict the effects of
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"copyleft".
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November: configure script and reported successful compiles on several
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major operating systems. The never-quite-understood -F option was added and
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curl could now simulate quite a lot of a browser. TELNET support was added.
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Curl 5 was released in December 1998 and introduced the first ever curl man
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page. People started making Linux RPM packages out of it.
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1999
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----
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January: DICT support added.
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OpenSSL took over and SSLeay was abandoned.
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May: first Debian package.
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August: LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl website gets 1300 visits
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weekly. Moved site to curl.haxx.nu.
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September: Released curl 6.0. 15000 lines of code.
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December 28: added the project on Sourceforge and started using its services
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for managing the project.
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2000
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----
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Spring: major internal overhaul to provide a suitable library interface.
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The first non-beta release was named 7.1 and arrived in August. This offered
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the easy interface and turned out to be the beginning of actually getting
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other software and programs to be based on and powered by libcurl. Almost
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20000 lines of code.
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June: the curl site moves to "curl.haxx.se"
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August, the curl website gets 4000 visits weekly.
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The PHP guys adopted libcurl already the same month, when the first ever third
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party libcurl binding showed up. CURL has been a supported module in PHP since
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the release of PHP 4.0.2. This would soon get followers. More than 16
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different bindings exist at the time of this writing.
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September: kerberos4 support was added.
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November: started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later re-written
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from scratch again. The libcurl major SONAME number was set to 1.
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2001
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----
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January: Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or
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MPL). The MIT license is extremely liberal and can be combined with GPL
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in other projects. This would finally put an end to the "complaints" from
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people involved in GPLed projects that previously were prohibited from using
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libcurl while it was released under MPL only. (Due to the fact that MPL is
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deemed "GPL incompatible".)
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March 22: curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7. This
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also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of
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code. The libcurl major SONAME number was bumped to 2 due to this overhaul.
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The first experimental ftps:// support was added.
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August: The curl website gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation contacted
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Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have never
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since got back in touch again.
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September: libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and `curl_formadd()`. During the
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forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and
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without many whistles.
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September 25: curl (7.7.2) is bundled in Mac OS X (10.1) for the first time. It was
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already becoming more and more of a standard utility of Linux distributions
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and a regular in the BSD ports collections.
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2002
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----
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June: the curl website gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is
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35000 lines of code. Reported successful compiles on more than 40 combinations
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of CPUs and operating systems.
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To estimate the number of users of the curl tool or libcurl library is next to
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impossible. Around 5000 downloaded packages each week from the main site gives
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a hint, but the packages are mirrored extensively, bundled with numerous OS
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distributions and otherwise retrieved as part of other software.
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October 1: with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license
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only.
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Starting with 7.10, curl verifies SSL server certificates by default.
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2003
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----
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January: Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds.
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February: the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given moment,
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there is an average of 3 people browsing the website.
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Multiple new authentication schemes are supported: Digest (May), NTLM (June)
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and Negotiate (June).
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November: curl 7.10.8 is released. 45000 lines of code. ~55000 unique visitors
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to the website. Five official web mirrors.
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December: full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported.
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2004
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----
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January: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support.
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June: curl 7.12.0 introduced IDN support. 10 official web mirrors.
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This release bumped the major SONAME to 3 due to the removal of the
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`curl_formparse()` function
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August: Curl and libcurl 7.12.1
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Public curl release number: 82
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Releases counted from the beginning: 109
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Available command line options: 96
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Available curl_easy_setopt() options: 120
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Number of public functions in libcurl: 36
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Amount of public website mirrors: 12
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Number of known libcurl bindings: 26
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2005
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----
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April: GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is
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built.
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April: Added the multi_socket() API
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September: TFTP support was added.
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More than 100,000 unique visitors of the curl website. 25 mirrors.
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December: security vulnerability: libcurl URL Buffer Overflow
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2006
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----
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January: We dropped support for Gopher. We found bugs in the implementation
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that turned out to have been introduced years ago, so with the conclusion that
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nobody had found out in all this time we removed it instead of fixing it.
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March: security vulnerability: libcurl TFTP Packet Buffer Overflow
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September: The major SONAME number for libcurl was bumped to 4 due to the
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removal of ftp third party transfer support.
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November: Added SCP and SFTP support
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2007
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----
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February: Added support for the Mozilla NSS library to do the SSL/TLS stuff
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July: security vulnerability: libcurl GnuTLS insufficient cert verification
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2008
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----
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November:
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Command line options: 128
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curl_easy_setopt() options: 158
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Public functions in libcurl: 58
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Known libcurl bindings: 37
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Contributors: 683
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145,000 unique visitors. >100 GB downloaded.
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2009
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March: security vulnerability: libcurl Arbitrary File Access
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April: added CMake support
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August: security vulnerability: libcurl embedded zero in cert name
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December: Added support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP
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2010
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----
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January: Added support for RTSP
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February: security vulnerability: libcurl data callback excessive length
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March: The project switched over to use git (hosted by GitHub) instead of CVS
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for source code control
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May: Added support for RTMP
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Added support for PolarSSL to do the SSL/TLS stuff
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August:
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Public curl releases: 117
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Command line options: 138
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curl_easy_setopt() options: 180
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Public functions in libcurl: 58
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Known libcurl bindings: 39
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Contributors: 808
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Gopher support added (re-added actually, see January 2006)
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2011
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----
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February: added support for the axTLS backend
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April: added the cyassl backend (later renamed to WolfSSL)
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2012
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----
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July: Added support for Schannel (native Windows TLS backend) and Darwin SSL
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(Native Mac OS X and iOS TLS backend).
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Supports Metalink
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October: SSH-agent support.
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2013
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----
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February: Cleaned up internals to always uses the "multi" non-blocking
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approach internally and only expose the blocking API with a wrapper.
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September: First small steps on supporting HTTP/2 with nghttp2.
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October: Removed krb4 support.
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December: Happy eyeballs.
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2014
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----
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March: first real release supporting HTTP/2
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September: Website had 245,000 unique visitors and served 236GB data
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SMB and SMBS support
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2015
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----
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June: support for multiplexing with HTTP/2
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August: support for HTTP/2 server push
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December: Public Suffix List
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2016
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----
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January: the curl tool defaults to HTTP/2 for HTTPS URLs
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December: curl 7.52.0 introduced support for HTTPS-proxy
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First TLS 1.3 support
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2017
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----
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July: OSS-Fuzz started fuzzing libcurl
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September: Added Multi-SSL support
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The website serves 3100 GB/month
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Public curl releases: 169
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Command line options: 211
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curl_easy_setopt() options: 249
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Public functions in libcurl: 74
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Contributors: 1609
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October: SSLKEYLOGFILE support, new MIME API
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October: Daniel received the Polhem Prize for his work on curl
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November: brotli
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2018
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----
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January: new SSH backend powered by libssh
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March: starting with the 1803 release of Windows 10, curl is shipped bundled
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with Microsoft's operating system.
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July: curl shows headers using bold type face
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October: added DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and the URL API
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MesaLink is a new supported TLS backend
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libcurl now does HTTP/2 (and multiplexing) by default on HTTPS URLs
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curl and libcurl are installed in an estimated 5 *billion* instances
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world-wide.
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October 31: Curl and libcurl 7.62.0
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Public curl releases: 177
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Command line options: 219
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curl_easy_setopt() options: 261
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Public functions in libcurl: 80
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Contributors: 1808
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December: removed axTLS support
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2019
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----
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March: added experimental alt-svc support
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August: the first HTTP/3 requests with curl.
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September: 7.66.0 is released and the tool offers parallel downloads
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2020
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----
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curl and libcurl are installed in an estimated 10 *billion* instances
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world-wide.
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January: added BearSSL support
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March: removed support for PolarSSL, added wolfSSH support
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April: experimental MQTT support
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August: zstd support
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November: the website moves to curl.se. The website serves 10TB data monthly.
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December: alt-svc support
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2021
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----
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February 3: curl 7.75.0 ships with support for Hyper as an HTTP backend
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March 31: curl 7.76.0 ships with support for rustls
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July: HSTS is supported
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2022
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----
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March: added --json, removed mesalink support
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Public curl releases: 206
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Command line options: 245
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curl_easy_setopt() options: 295
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Public functions in libcurl: 86
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Contributors: 2601
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The curl.se website serves 16,500 GB/month over 462M requests, the
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official docker image has been pulled 4,098,015,431 times.
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2023
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----
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August: Dropped support for the NSS library
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