- _ _ ____ _
- ___| | | | _ \| |
- / __| | | | |_) | |
- | (__| |_| | _ <| |___
+ _ _ ____ _
+ ___| | | | _ \| |
+ / __| | | | |_) | |
+ | (__| |_| | _ <| |___
\___|\___/|_| \_\_____|
How cURL Became Like This
-In the second half of 1997, Daniel Stenberg came up with the idea to make
+Towards the end of 1996, Daniel Stenberg came up with the idea to make
currency-exchange calculations available to Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
users. All the necessary data are published on the Web; he just needed to
automate their retrieval.
Daniel simply adopted an existing command-line open-source tool, httpget, that
-Brazilian Rafael Sagula had written. After a few minor adjustments, it did
-just what he needed.
+Brazilian Rafael Sagula had written and recently release version 0.1 of. After
+a few minor adjustments, it did just what he needed. HttpGet 1.0 was released
+on April 8th 1997 with brand new HTTP proxy support.
-Soon, he found currencies on a GOPHER site, so support for that had to go in,
-and not before long FTP download support was added as well. The name of the
-project was changed to urlget to better fit what it actually did now, since
-the http-only days were already passed.
+We soon found and fixed support for getting currencies over GOPHER. Once FTP
+download support was added, the name of the project was changed and urlget 2.0
+was released in August 1997. The http-only days were already passed.
The project slowly grew bigger. When upload capabilities were added and the
name once again was misleading, a second name change was made and on March 20,
-1998 curl 4 was released. (The version numbering from the previous names were
+1998 curl 4 was released. (The version numbering from the previous names was
kept.)
-(Unrelated to this project a company called Curl Corporation filed a US
+(Unrelated to this project a company called Curl Corporation registered a US
trademark on the name "CURL" on May 18 1998. That company had then already
registered the curl.com domain back in November of the previous year. All this
-was much later brought into the lights.)
+was revealed to us much later.)
SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library.
-August 1998, added project curl to freshmeat.net.
+August 1998, first announcement of curl on freshmeat.net.
October 1998, with the curl 4.9 release and the introduction of cookie
support, curl was no longer released under the GPL license. Now we're at 4000
November 1998, configure script and reported successful compiles on several
major operating systems. The never-quite-understood -F option was added and
-curl could now simulate quite a lot of a browser.
+curl could now simulate quite a lot of a browser. TELNET support was added.
Curl 5 was released in December 1998 and introduced the first ever curl man
page. People started making Linux RPM packages out of it.
September 2000, kerberos4 support was added.
In November 2000 started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later
-re-written from scratch again.
+re-written from scratch again. The libcurl major SONAME number was set to 1.
January 2001, Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or
MPL). The MIT license is extremely liberal and can be used combined with GPL
curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7, March 22 2001. This
also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of
-code.
+code. The libcurl major SONAME number was bumped to 2 due to this overhaul.
+
+The first experimental ftps:// support was added in March 2001.
August 2001. curl is bundled in Mac OS X, 10.1. It was already becoming more
and more of a standard utility of Linux distributions and a regular in the BSD
September 2002, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT
license only.
+January 2003. Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds.
+
February 2003, the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given
moment, there's an average of 3 people browsing the curl.haxx.se site.
+
+Multiple new authentication schemes are supported: Digest (May), NTLM (June)
+and Negotiate (June).
+
+November 2003: curl 7.10.8 is released. 45000 lines of code. ~55000 unique
+visitors to the curl.haxx.se site. Five official web mirrors.
+
+December 2003, full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported.
+
+January 2004: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support.
+
+June 2004:
+
+ curl 7.12.0 introduced IDN support. 10 official web mirrors.
+
+ This release bumped the major SONAME to 3 due to the removal of the
+ curl_formparse() function
+
+August 2004:
+ Curl and libcurl 7.12.1
+
+ Public curl release number: 82
+ Releases counted from the very beginning: 109
+ Available command line options: 96
+ Available curl_easy_setopt() options: 120
+ Number of public functions in libcurl: 36
+ Amount of public web site mirrors: 12
+ Number of known libcurl bindings: 26
+
+April 2005:
+
+ GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is built.
+
+September 2005:
+
+ TFTP support was added.
+
+ More than 100,000 unique visitors of the curl web site. 25 mirrors.
+
+December 2005:
+
+ security vulnerability: libcurl URL Buffer Overflow
+
+January 2006:
+
+ We dropped support for Gopher. We found bugs in the implementation that
+ turned out having been introduced years ago, so with the conclusion that
+ nobody had found out in all this time we removed it instead of fixing it.
+
+March 2006:
+
+ security vulnerability: libcurl TFTP Packet Buffer Overflow
+
+April 2006:
+
+ Added the multi_socket() API
+
+September 2006:
+
+ The major SONAME number for libcurl was bumped to 4 due to the removal of
+ ftp third party transfer support.
+
+November 2006:
+
+ Added SCP and SFTP support
+
+February 2007:
+
+ Added support for the Mozilla NSS library to do the SSL/TLS stuff
+
+July 2007:
+
+ security vulnerability: libcurl GnuTLS insufficient cert verification
+
+November 2008:
+
+ Command line options: 128
+ curl_easy_setopt() options: 158
+ Public functions in libcurl: 58
+ Known libcurl bindings: 37
+ Contributors: 683
+
+ 145,000 unique visitors. >100 GB downloaded.
+
+March 2009:
+
+ security vulnerability: libcurl Arbitrary File Access
+
+August 2009:
+
+ security vulnerability: libcurl embedded zero in cert name
+
+December 2009:
+
+ Added support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP
+
+January 2010:
+
+ Added support for RTSP
+
+February 2010:
+
+ security vulnerability: libcurl data callback excessive length
+
+March 2010:
+
+ The project switched over to use git instead of CVS for source code control
+
+May 2010:
+
+ Added support for RTMP
+
+ Added support for PolarSSL to do the SSL/TLS stuff
+
+August 2010:
+
+ Public curl releases: 117
+ Command line options: 138
+ curl_easy_setopt() options: 180
+ Public functions in libcurl: 58
+ Known libcurl bindings: 39
+ Contributors: 808
+
+ Gopher support added (re-added actually)
projects / platform / upstream / curl.git / blobdiff