| (__| |_| | _ <| |___
\___|\___/|_| \_\_____|
- How cURL Became Like This
+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 was spending time writing an IRC bot
+for an Amiga related channel on EFnet. He then 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.
+
+1997
+----
+
+HttpGet 1.0 was released on April 8th 1997 with brand new HTTP proxy support.
+
+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.
-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.
+1998
+----
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,
SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library.
-August 1998, first announcement of curl on freshmeat.net.
+August, 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
-lines of code, we switched over to the MPL license to restrict the effects of
+October, 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 lines of
+code, we switched over to the MPL license to restrict the effects of
"copyleft".
-November 1998, configure script and reported successful compiles on several
+November, 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. 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.
-January 1999, DICT support added.
+1999
+----
+
+January, DICT support added.
OpenSSL took over where SSLeay was abandoned.
-May 1999, first Debian package.
+May, first Debian package.
-August 1999, LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl web site gets 1300
-visits weekly.
+August, LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl web site gets 1300 visits
+weekly.
Released curl 6.0 in September. 15000 lines of code.
-December 28 1999, added the project on Sourceforge and started using its
-services for managing the project.
+December 28, added the project on Sourceforge and started using its services
+for managing the project.
+
+2000
+----
Spring 2000, major internal overhaul to provide a suitable library interface.
The first non-beta release was named 7.1 and arrived in August. This offered
other software and programs to get based on and powered by libcurl. Almost
20000 lines of code.
-August 2000, the curl web site gets 4000 visits weekly.
+August, the curl web site gets 4000 visits weekly.
The PHP guys adopted libcurl already the same month, when the first ever third
party libcurl binding showed up. CURL has been a supported module in PHP since
the release of PHP 4.0.2. This would soon get followers. More than 16
different bindings exist at the time of this writing.
-September 2000, kerberos4 support was added.
+September, kerberos4 support was added.
+
+In November started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later re-written
+from scratch again. The libcurl major SONAME number was set to 1.
-In November 2000 started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later
-re-written from scratch again.
+2001
+----
-January 2001, Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or
+January, 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
in other projects. This would finally put an end to the "complaints" from
people involved in GPLed projects that previously were prohibited from using
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
+August. 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
ports collections. The curl web site gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation
contacted Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have
never since got in touch again.
-September 2001, libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During
-the forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and
+September, libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During the
+forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and
without much whistles.
-June 2002, the curl web site gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is
+2002
+----
+
+June, the curl web site gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is
35000 lines of code. Reported successful compiles on more than 40 combinations
of CPUs and operating systems.
a hint, but the packages are mirrored extensively, bundled with numerous OS
distributions and otherwise retrieved as part of other software.
-September 2002, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT
-license only.
+September, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license
+only.
+
+2003
+----
-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.
+January. Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds.
+
+February, 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.
+November: curl 7.10.8 is released. 45000 lines of code. ~55000 unique visitors
+to the curl.haxx.se site. Five official web mirrors.
+
+December, full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported.
+
+2004
+----
+
+January: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support.
+
+June: 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: 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
+
+2005
+----
+
+April. GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is
+built.
+
+September: TFTP support was added.
+
+More than 100,000 unique visitors of the curl web site. 25 mirrors.
+
+December: security vulnerability: libcurl URL Buffer Overflow
+
+2006
+----
+
+January. 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: security vulnerability: libcurl TFTP Packet Buffer Overflow
+
+April: Added the multi_socket() API
+
+September: The major SONAME number for libcurl was bumped to 4 due to the
+removal of ftp third party transfer support.
+
+November: Added SCP and SFTP support
+
+2007
+----
+
+February: Added support for the Mozilla NSS library to do the SSL/TLS stuff
+
+July: security vulnerability: libcurl GnuTLS insufficient cert verification
+
+2008
+----
+
+November:
+
+ 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.
+
+2009
+----
+
+March: security vulnerability: libcurl Arbitrary File Access
+
+August: security vulnerability: libcurl embedded zero in cert name
+
+December: Added support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP
+
+2010
+----
+
+January: Added support for RTSP
+
+February: security vulnerability: libcurl data callback excessive length
+
+March: The project switched over to use git (hosted by github) instead of CVS
+for source code control
+
+May: Added support for RTMP
+
+Added support for PolarSSL to do the SSL/TLS stuff
+
+August:
+
+ 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)
+
+2012
+----
+
+ July: Added support for Schannel (native Windows TLS backend) and Darwin SSL
+ (Native Mac OS X and iOS TLS backend).
+
+ Supports metalink
+
+ October: SSH-agent support.
+
+2013
+----
-December 2003, full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported.
+ February: Cleaned up internals to always uses the "multi" non-blocking
+ approach internally and only expose the blocking API with a wrapper.
-January 2004: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support.
+ September: First small steps on supporting HTTP/2 with nghttp2.
-June 2004: curl 7.12.0 introduced IDN support. 10 official web mirrors.
+ October: Removed krb4 support.
-August 2004:
- Curl and libcurl 7.12.1
+ December: Happy eyeballs.
- 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
+2014
+----
-April 2005:
+ March: first real release supporting HTTP/2
-GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is built.
+ September: Web site had 245,000 unique visitors and served 236GB data
projects / platform / upstream / curl.git / blobdiff