- _ _ ____ _
- ___| | | | _ \| |
- / __| | | | |_) | |
- | (__| |_| | _ <| |___
- \___|\___/|_| \_\_____|
-
-How cURL Became Like This
+How curl Became Like This
=========================
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
+users. All the necessary data were 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 and recently release version 0.1 of. After
+Brazilian Rafael Sagula had written and recently released version 0.1 of. After
a few minor adjustments, it did just what he needed.
1997
SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library.
-August, first announcement of curl on freshmeat.net.
+August: first announcement of curl on freshmeat.net.
-October, with the curl 4.9 release and the introduction of cookie support,
+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, 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.
1999
----
-January, DICT support added.
+January: DICT support added.
-OpenSSL took over where SSLeay was abandoned.
+OpenSSL took over and SSLeay was abandoned.
-May, first Debian package.
+May: first Debian package.
-August, LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl web site gets 1300 visits
+August: LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl web site gets 1300 visits
weekly. Moved site to curl.haxx.nu.
-Released curl 6.0 in September. 15000 lines of code.
+September: Released curl 6.0. 15000 lines of code.
-December 28, added the project on Sourceforge and started using its services
+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.
+Spring: major internal overhaul to provide a suitable library interface.
The first non-beta release was named 7.1 and arrived in August. This offered
the easy interface and turned out to be the beginning of actually getting
-other software and programs to get based on and powered by libcurl. Almost
+other software and programs to be based on and powered by libcurl. Almost
20000 lines of code.
-June 2000: the curl site moves to "curl.haxx.se"
+June: the curl site moves to "curl.haxx.se"
August, the curl web site gets 4000 visits weekly.
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, 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
+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.
2001
----
-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
+January: Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or
+MPL). The MIT license is extremely liberal and can be 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
libcurl while it was released under MPL only. (Due to the fact that MPL is
deemed "GPL incompatible".)
-curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7, March 22 2001. This
+March 22: curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7. This
also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of
code. The libcurl major SONAME number was bumped to 2 due to this overhaul.
+The first experimental ftps:// support was added.
-The first experimental ftps:// support was added in March 2001.
-
-August. curl is bundled in Mac OS X, 10.1. It was already becoming more and
+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.
+never since got back in touch again.
-September, libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During the
+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.
+without many whistles.
2002
----
-June, the curl web site gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is
+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, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license
+September: with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license
only.
2003
----
-January. Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds.
+January: Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds.
-February, the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given moment,
+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)
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.
+December: full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported.
2004
----
August: Curl and libcurl 7.12.1
- Public curl release number: 82
+ Public curl release number: 82
Releases counted from the very beginning: 109
- Available command line options: 96
+ 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
+ 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
+April: GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is
built.
April: Added the multi_socket() API
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
+January: We dropped support for Gopher. We found bugs in the implementation
+that turned out to have 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
Command line options: 128
curl_easy_setopt() options: 158
- Public functions in libcurl: 58
- Known libcurl bindings: 37
+ Public functions in libcurl: 58
+ Known libcurl bindings: 37
Contributors: 683
145,000 unique visitors. >100 GB downloaded.
Public curl releases: 117
Command line options: 138
curl_easy_setopt() options: 180
- Public functions in libcurl: 58
- Known libcurl bindings: 39
+ Public functions in libcurl: 58
+ Known libcurl bindings: 39
Contributors: 808
- Gopher support added (re-added actually)
+ Gopher support added (re-added actually, see January 2006)
2012
----
projects / platform / upstream / curl.git / blobdiff