[Daniel's week] August 18, 2023

[Daniel Stenberg]

Hello friends.

Another week ended. This is what I did.

## IDN

I mentioned it last week and I managed to land code in curl this week [2] that 
lets the libcurl URL API convert a punycode hostname into its IDN version. 
Previously it could only do the conversion the other way around since it has 
only been used for curl's own purposes and then it needs the punycode to 
resolve it in DNS but curl would never need to convert it back.

The conversion "need" in the other direction came when we wanted to offer that 
functionality for trurl - where I think it makes perfect sense to have that 
ability. The feature is now in the works for trurl [3] by Jacob Mealey.

## changelog

I blogged [1] about my work on extracting changelog entries from the time 
before curl was renamed to curl. Later in the week I have also tweaked several 
of the graphs on the dashboard [4] to include data already from the first 
days, such as the "line of code" graph [5] for example. It will be notable 
starting tomorrow.

httpget 0.1 was an (estimated) 160 lines of code. httpget 1.4 was 193 lines. 
Today we are slightly below 160,000 lines.

## authors

In my records for what things that happened in the curl project at specific 
dates I spotted that on this day exactly six years ago, August 18 2017, we 
reached 500 commit authors in the curl project. Today we are at 1,184, meaning 
that on average we have had more than two new commit authors per week the last 
six years. Pretty decent I think.

Of course, out of those 1184, 768 (64,9%) only ever committed *once*. Back in 
2017, the share of single-committers was only 56.2%.

## comparison

I fished for feedback on my download tool comparison table [6] and got some, 
which resulted in a refreshed version that hopefully now also is a little more 
accurate and interesting. It compares nine different HTTP/download tools, 
where (of course) a primary idea is to show and see how curl fares against 
"the competition".

I beleive it can still be expanded and improved, but that's of course a state 
it has always been in!

## business

I sent off quotes to two (big) companies with week about curl services I (and 
wolfSSL) offer to do for them. Finally sending out the actual asked for price 
is always little bit nervous I think, as then things suddenly gets proper real 
as then the discussion goes over to them having to show how serious they are 
and how keen they are in getting the things they have asked for.

I'm eagerly awaiting their responses.

## release images

Pretty much since I started doing blog posts about curl releases, which is a 
practice I have held up for quite a number of years now, I have created and 
used "release images". They are basically just images that says "curl" and the 
version number, ideally with some twist, that I used as a header image for the 
blog posts - and in the release videos. At times I have figured out something 
that was related to certain features or fixes in the particular release to put 
in the picture - like I used a sock with a spider web on it for the release 
that introduced WebSocket support. Sometimes I tried to ask around to get 
someone else to make the image for me, but that rarely worked. Recently, I 
switched to basically just render similar images since I got tired trying to 
be creative with the images.

I have now decided to take these in a little different direction: I got myself 
a set of wooden tiles, scrabble-like pieces really, with digits on them that I 
am going to use that allows me to instead take release photos. I combine a few 
curl stickers with a few tiles for the version number and voila. An example 
[7]. I suppose the future will tell if this idea sticks.

## Coming up

- curl feature freeze starts today

## Links

[1] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/08/15/changes-from-before-it-was-curl/
[2] = https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/11655
[3] = https://github.com/curl/trurl/pull/231
[4] = https://curl.se/dashboard.html
[5] = https://curl.se/dashboard1.html#loc
[6] = https://curl.se/docs/comparison-table.html
[7] = https://mastodon.social/@bagder/110893990312846133


-- 

  / daniel.haxx.se