142 lines
5.9 KiB
Plaintext
142 lines
5.9 KiB
Plaintext
_ _ ____ _
|
|
___| | | | _ \| |
|
|
/ __| | | | |_) | |
|
|
| (__| |_| | _ <| |___
|
|
\___|\___/|_| \_\_____|
|
|
|
|
How cURL Became Like This
|
|
|
|
|
|
In the second half of 1997, 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.
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
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 was
|
|
kept.)
|
|
|
|
(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 revealed to us much later.)
|
|
|
|
SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library.
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
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
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
OpenSSL took over where SSLeay was abandoned.
|
|
|
|
May 1999, first Debian package.
|
|
|
|
August 1999, 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.
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
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
|
|
20000 lines of code.
|
|
|
|
August 2000, 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.
|
|
|
|
In November 2000 started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later
|
|
re-written from scratch again.
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
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
|
|
also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of
|
|
code.
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
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
|
|
without much whistles.
|
|
|
|
June 2002, 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.
|
|
|
|
To estimate number of users of the curl tool or libcurl library is next to
|
|
impossible. Around 5000 downloaded packages each week from the main site gives
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
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
|