117 lines
5.1 KiB
Plaintext
117 lines
5.1 KiB
Plaintext
_ _ ____ _
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/ __| | | | |_) | |
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| (__| |_| | _ <| |___
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\___|\___/|_| \_\_____|
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How cURL Became Like This
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In the second half of 1997, Daniel Stenberg 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 are published on the Web; he just needed to
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automate their retrieval.
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Daniel simply adopted an existing command-line open-source tool, httpget, that
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Brazilian Rafael Sagula had written. After a few minor adjustments, it did
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just what he needed.
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Soon, he found currencies on a GOPHER site, so support for that had to go in,
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and not before long FTP download support was added as well. The name of the
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project was changed to urlget to better fit what it actually did now, since
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the http-only days were already passed.
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The project slowly grew bigger. When upload capabilities were added and the
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name once again was misleading, a second name change was made and on March 20,
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1998 curl 4 was released. (The version numbering from the previous names were
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kept.)
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(Unrelated to this project a company called Curl Corporation filed 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 much later brought into the lights.)
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SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library.
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August 1998, added project curl to freshmeat.net.
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October 1998, with the curl 4.9 release and the introduction of cookie
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support, curl was no longer released under the GPL license. Now we're at 4000
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lines of code, we switched over to the MPL license to restrict the effects of
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"copyleft".
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November 1998, 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.
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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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January 1999, DICT support added.
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OpenSSL took over where SSLeay was abandoned.
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May 1999, first Debian package.
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August 1999, LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl web site gets 1300
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visits weekly.
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Released curl 6.0 in September. 15000 lines of code.
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December 28 1999, added the project on Sourceforge and started using its
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services for managing the project.
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Spring 2000, 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 get based on and powered by libcurl. Almost
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20000 lines of code.
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August 2000, the curl web site 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 2000, kerberos4 support was added.
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In November 2000 started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later
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re-written from scratch again.
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January 2001, 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 used 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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curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7, March 22 2001. This
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also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of
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code.
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August 2001. curl is bundled in Mac OS X, 10.1. It was already becoming more
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and more of a standard utility of Linux distributions and a regular in the BSD
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ports collections. The curl web site gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation
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contacted Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have
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never since got in touch again.
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September 2001, libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During
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the forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and
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without much whistles.
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June 2002, the curl web site 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 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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September 2002, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT
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license only.
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February 2003, the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given
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moment, there's an average of 3 people browsing the curl.haxx.se site.
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