1 How curl Became Like This
2 =========================
4 Towards the end of 1996, Daniel Stenberg was spending time writing an IRC bot
5 for an Amiga related channel on EFnet. He then came up with the idea to make
6 currency-exchange calculations available to Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
7 users. All the necessary data were published on the Web; he just needed to
8 automate their retrieval.
10 Daniel simply adopted an existing command-line open-source tool, httpget, that
11 Brazilian Rafael Sagula had written and recently released version 0.1 of. After
12 a few minor adjustments, it did just what he needed.
17 HttpGet 1.0 was released on April 8th 1997 with brand new HTTP proxy support.
19 We soon found and fixed support for getting currencies over GOPHER. Once FTP
20 download support was added, the name of the project was changed and urlget 2.0
21 was released in August 1997. The http-only days were already passed.
26 The project slowly grew bigger. When upload capabilities were added and the
27 name once again was misleading, a second name change was made and on March 20,
28 1998 curl 4 was released. (The version numbering from the previous names was
31 (Unrelated to this project a company called Curl Corporation registered a US
32 trademark on the name "CURL" on May 18 1998. That company had then already
33 registered the curl.com domain back in November of the previous year. All this
34 was revealed to us much later.)
36 SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library.
38 August: first announcement of curl on freshmeat.net.
40 October: with the curl 4.9 release and the introduction of cookie support,
41 curl was no longer released under the GPL license. Now we're at 4000 lines of
42 code, we switched over to the MPL license to restrict the effects of
45 November: configure script and reported successful compiles on several
46 major operating systems. The never-quite-understood -F option was added and
47 curl could now simulate quite a lot of a browser. TELNET support was added.
49 Curl 5 was released in December 1998 and introduced the first ever curl man
50 page. People started making Linux RPM packages out of it.
55 January: DICT support added.
57 OpenSSL took over and SSLeay was abandoned.
59 May: first Debian package.
61 August: LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl web site gets 1300 visits
62 weekly. Moved site to curl.haxx.nu.
64 September: Released curl 6.0. 15000 lines of code.
66 December 28: added the project on Sourceforge and started using its services
67 for managing the project.
72 Spring: major internal overhaul to provide a suitable library interface.
73 The first non-beta release was named 7.1 and arrived in August. This offered
74 the easy interface and turned out to be the beginning of actually getting
75 other software and programs to be based on and powered by libcurl. Almost
78 June: the curl site moves to "curl.haxx.se"
80 August, the curl web site gets 4000 visits weekly.
82 The PHP guys adopted libcurl already the same month, when the first ever third
83 party libcurl binding showed up. CURL has been a supported module in PHP since
84 the release of PHP 4.0.2. This would soon get followers. More than 16
85 different bindings exist at the time of this writing.
87 September: kerberos4 support was added.
89 November: started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later re-written
90 from scratch again. The libcurl major SONAME number was set to 1.
95 January: Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or
96 MPL). The MIT license is extremely liberal and can be combined with GPL
97 in other projects. This would finally put an end to the "complaints" from
98 people involved in GPLed projects that previously were prohibited from using
99 libcurl while it was released under MPL only. (Due to the fact that MPL is
100 deemed "GPL incompatible".)
102 March 22: curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7. This
103 also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of
104 code. The libcurl major SONAME number was bumped to 2 due to this overhaul.
105 The first experimental ftps:// support was added.
107 August: curl is bundled in Mac OS X, 10.1. It was already becoming more and
108 more of a standard utility of Linux distributions and a regular in the BSD
109 ports collections. The curl web site gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation
110 contacted Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have
111 never since got back in touch again.
113 September: libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During the
114 forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and
115 without many whistles.
120 June: the curl web site gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is
121 35000 lines of code. Reported successful compiles on more than 40 combinations
122 of CPUs and operating systems.
124 To estimate number of users of the curl tool or libcurl library is next to
125 impossible. Around 5000 downloaded packages each week from the main site gives
126 a hint, but the packages are mirrored extensively, bundled with numerous OS
127 distributions and otherwise retrieved as part of other software.
129 September: with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license
135 January: Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds.
137 February: the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given moment,
138 there's an average of 3 people browsing the curl.haxx.se site.
140 Multiple new authentication schemes are supported: Digest (May), NTLM (June)
141 and Negotiate (June).
143 November: curl 7.10.8 is released. 45000 lines of code. ~55000 unique visitors
144 to the curl.haxx.se site. Five official web mirrors.
146 December: full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported.
151 January: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support.
153 June: curl 7.12.0 introduced IDN support. 10 official web mirrors.
155 This release bumped the major SONAME to 3 due to the removal of the
156 curl_formparse() function
158 August: Curl and libcurl 7.12.1
160 Public curl release number: 82
161 Releases counted from the very beginning: 109
162 Available command line options: 96
163 Available curl_easy_setopt() options: 120
164 Number of public functions in libcurl: 36
165 Amount of public web site mirrors: 12
166 Number of known libcurl bindings: 26
171 April: GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is
174 April: Added the multi_socket() API
176 September: TFTP support was added.
178 More than 100,000 unique visitors of the curl web site. 25 mirrors.
180 December: security vulnerability: libcurl URL Buffer Overflow
185 January: We dropped support for Gopher. We found bugs in the implementation
186 that turned out to have been introduced years ago, so with the conclusion that
187 nobody had found out in all this time we removed it instead of fixing it.
189 March: security vulnerability: libcurl TFTP Packet Buffer Overflow
191 September: The major SONAME number for libcurl was bumped to 4 due to the
192 removal of ftp third party transfer support.
194 November: Added SCP and SFTP support
199 February: Added support for the Mozilla NSS library to do the SSL/TLS stuff
201 July: security vulnerability: libcurl GnuTLS insufficient cert verification
208 Command line options: 128
209 curl_easy_setopt() options: 158
210 Public functions in libcurl: 58
211 Known libcurl bindings: 37
214 145,000 unique visitors. >100 GB downloaded.
219 March: security vulnerability: libcurl Arbitrary File Access
221 August: security vulnerability: libcurl embedded zero in cert name
223 December: Added support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP
228 January: Added support for RTSP
230 February: security vulnerability: libcurl data callback excessive length
232 March: The project switched over to use git (hosted by github) instead of CVS
233 for source code control
235 May: Added support for RTMP
237 Added support for PolarSSL to do the SSL/TLS stuff
241 Public curl releases: 117
242 Command line options: 138
243 curl_easy_setopt() options: 180
244 Public functions in libcurl: 58
245 Known libcurl bindings: 39
248 Gopher support added (re-added actually, see January 2006)
253 July: Added support for Schannel (native Windows TLS backend) and Darwin SSL
254 (Native Mac OS X and iOS TLS backend).
258 October: SSH-agent support.
263 February: Cleaned up internals to always uses the "multi" non-blocking
264 approach internally and only expose the blocking API with a wrapper.
266 September: First small steps on supporting HTTP/2 with nghttp2.
268 October: Removed krb4 support.
270 December: Happy eyeballs.
275 March: first real release supporting HTTP/2
277 September: Web site had 245,000 unique visitors and served 236GB data
282 December: curl 7.52.0 introduced support for HTTPS-proxy!
287 September: Added Multi-SSL support
289 The web site serves 3100 GB/month
291 Public curl releases: 169
292 Command line options: 211
293 curl_easy_setopt() options: 249
294 Public functions in libcurl: 74