We’re proudly presenting a major new release of curl and libcurl and we call it 7.20.0.

The primary reason we decided to bump the minor number this time was that we introduce a range of new protocols, but we also did some other rather big works. This is the biggest update to curl and libcurl that have been made in recent years. Let me mention some of the other noteworthy changes and bugfixes:

We fixed a potential security issue, that would occur if an application requested to download compressed HTTP content and told libcurl to automatically uncompress it (CURLOPT_ENCODING) as then libcurl could wrongly call the write callback (CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION) with a larger buffer than what is documented to be the maximum size.

TFTP was finally converted to a “proper” protocol internally. By that I mean that it can now be used with the multi interface in an asynchronous way and it has far less special treatments. It is now “just another protocol” basically and that is a good thing. Also, the BLKSIZE problem with TFTP that has haunted us for a while was fixed so I really think this is the best version ever for TFTP in libcurl.

In several different places in the code older versions of libcurl didn’t properly call the progress callback while waiting for some special event to happen. This made the curl tool’s progress meter less responding but perhaps more importantly it prevented apps that use libcurl to abort the transfer during those phases. The affected periods included the ftp connection phase (including the initial FTP commands and responses), waiting for the TCP connect to complete and resolving host names using c-ares.

The DNS cache was found to have at least two bugs that could make entries linger in the database eternally and in another case too long. For apps that use a lot of connections to a lot of hosts, these problems could result in some serious performance punishments when the DNS cache lookups got slower and slower over time.

Users of the funny ftp server drftpd will appreciate that (lib)curl now support the PRET command, which is needed when getting data off such servers in passive mode. It’s a bit of a hack, but what can we do? We didn’t invent it nor can we help that it’s a popular thing to use! 😉