Tag Archives: cURL and libcurl

cURL and libcurl, libssh2

A new year with new fun

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I had a great and relaxing winter/Christmas holiday and hence my silence here.

I’m now back up to speed, with a podcast interview done yesterday (I’ll post another entry when it gets available), I do some funded development on libcurl and libssh2 in the background while I’m spending my days at my client’s place working on a 10G traffic analyzer product.

It was rather calm during “the break” but I’ve now noticed that at least the curl project has gotten significantly increased activity again. We’re on a feature freeze now for the January release, but there seems to be at least 4 patches pending adding new stuff for the release planned to come after this (around March if things go well).

cURL and libcurl

More libcurl adoption

Some recent news showing libcurl possibly widening its user-base:

Eugene V. Lyubimkin posted a suggestion that libcurl should be used by the upcoming APT release for all ftp and http accesses!

Mr Johansen at Sun told us libcurl is being considered (via the pycurl binding) for the new OpenSolaris package manager.

perl’s widely used module for HTTP/FTP etc, called LWP, has gotten a libcurl-powered sibling called LPW-curl, which if I understand things correctly makes transfers using the traditional LWP-style and API but is powered by libcurl underneath.

Someone (not being me) registered libcurl.org. The site actually contains rather accurate info but if I disable adblock it shows lots of ads on the page though so I guess that’s why the page exists… (googling for “libcurl” now shows this site among the 5-6 first hits, which surprises me…)

More?

cURL and libcurl, Linux, Web

Solaris 10 ships libcurl

I fell over this document named “What’s New in the Solaris 10 10/08 Release” and it includes this funny little quote towards the end:

C-URL – The C-URL Wrappers Library

C-URL is a utility library that provides programmatic access to the most common Internet protocols such as, HTTP, FTP, TFTP, SFTP, and TELNET. C-URL is also extensively used in various applications.

The project is cURL, the tool is curl and the library is libcurl. There’s nothing named C-URL and it isn’t any “wrappers library”… And the list of protocols is also funny since it includes 6 protocols while a modern libcurl supports 13 different ones, and also if you build libcurl to support SFTP you also get SCP (which the list doesn’t include) etc.

It just looks so very sloppy to me. But hey, what do I know?

cURL and libcurl

curl presentation video

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I held a 38 minute talk (in English) at the FSCONS conference 2007 about curl and libcurl, and now I’ve realized that the recording from that event is available online in various forms and ways.

You can get the pure Ogg Theora video files by using these links:

The slides from the presentation are still available.

fsfe.org hosts the complete collection of videos from that conference.

I haven’t yet had time and oppurtunity to watch it myself. I figure I’ll do that soon to see and learn from my own mistakes and odd habits when talking in public… and try to not get disturbed too much by my own accent!

cURL and libcurl

What is this yassl really?

yassl is said to be Yet Another SSL library and I’ve been told that for example it is the preferred library used by the mysql camp. I got interested in this several years ago when I learned about it since I thought it was fun to see an alternative implementation of OpenSSL that still offers the same API.

Since then, I’ve amused myself by trying to build and run curl with it like every six months or so. I’ve made (lib)curl build fine with yassl (and its configure script also detects that it is an OpenSSL API emulated by yassl), but I’ve never seen it run the entire curl test suite through without failing at least one test!

I asked the mysql guy about how yassl has worked for them, but he kind of shrugged and admitted that they hadn’t tried it much (and then I don’t know really who he spoke for, the entire team or just he and his closest friends) but he said it worked for them.

Today I noticed the yassl version 1.9.6 that I downloaded, built and tried against curl. This time curl completely fails to build with it…

Let me also point out that it’s not like I’ve not told the yassl team (person?) about these problems in the past. I have, and there have been adjustments that have been meant to address problems I’ve seen. I just can’t make curl use it successfully… libcurl can still be built and run with OpenSSL, GnuTLS or NSS so it’s not like we lack SSL library alternatives.

The same team/person seems to behind another SSL lib called Cyassl that’s aimed for smaller footprint systems and I’ve heard whispers about people trying to get libcurl to build against that and it surely is going to be interesting to see where that leads!

cURL and libcurl, Development

Metalink in curl bounty

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The Metalink guys host a list of project ideas and one of those ideas is to add metalink support to curl, and I recently bumped the stakes a bit by raising the bounty with an additional 200 USD so that the offer is now 500 USD for the person or team that brings the feature as described.

My primary motivation for doing this is that I like the metalink idea and I’d like to help making sure it gets used more widely.

cURL and libcurl

curl 7.19.1

Trying hard to maintain the bimonthly release schedule we’ve been keeping up with for quite some time by now, we therefore now proudly announce the release of curl and libcurl 7.19.1

This release includes at least 24 bug fixes and the following changes:

Development, Open Source

The Open Source Census Report

I’d never heard about the Open Source Census before when I fell over a mention of their recent report somewhere. Their mission is to get “enterprises” to install their little client which scans computers for open source products and reports the findings back to a central server.

Anyway, their current database consists of a “mere” 2300 machines scanned but that equals a total of 314,000 open source installations. 768 different packages are identified. The top-10 found products are:

  1. firefox 84.4%
  2. zlib 65.75%
  3. xerces 61.24%
  4. wget 61.12%
  5. xalan 58.19%
  6. prototype 57.03%
  7. activation 53.01%
  8. javamail 50.15%
  9. openssl 46.45%
  10. docbook-xml 46.27%

Ok, as an open source hacker and a geek, there are two things we need to do here: 1) find out how our own projects rank among the others and 2) how the scanning is done and thus how good it is. Thankfully all this is possible due to the entire data set being downloadable for free and the client being fully open source.

find out how our own projects rank

“curl” was found on 18.19% of all computers. That makes it #81 on the list, just below virtualbox and wireshark, but immediately above jstl and busybox. This includes “All Versions” of all tools, and for curl’s sake that was 22 different versions!

I found no other project I do anything noticeable in. Subversion is at #44.

how the scanning is done

It’s quite simple. It scans for file names based on a file name pattern and then it pattern matches contents of those files. It also extracts version numbers for the files using those regex patterns. You can see the full set of patterns/rules in the XML file straight off their source code repository: project-rules.xml.

how good is it

With this specific patterns for binary contents they of course need special human treatment for many versions and that is of course error-prone. That could explain why no curl version of the latest version (7.19.0) was reported. It will also cause renamed tools to remain undetected.

In my particular case I would of course also like to know how much libcurl is used, but they don’t seem to check for that (I found several projects besides the curl tool that I know use libcurl).

All this said, I didn’t actually try out the client myself so I haven’t verified it for real.