[Daniel's week] December 1, 2023

[Daniel Stenberg]

Hello friends,

Another week passed.

## release prep

I'm lining up the ducks this week and getting myself and curl ready for the
8.5.0 release next week. We've received a fair amount of snow over the last
week so when the sun was out I took the opportunity and took my "release
image" for the release in the snow [7] with my wooden tiles in the same spirit
as recent releases.

We have two pending security advisories and I pre-notified the distros
mailing list about them both this week. We have given them severity level
medium and low, and I don't think they will cause much panic when you all get
to learn about the specifics on Wednesday.

Otherwise, the prepping is mostly about slowly fix bugs and merge bugfixes
while working on the release blog post and the corresponding slides for the
release presentation.

## c-ares

Brad House has continued to work on c-ares stuff like a madman so this week we
shipped c-ares 1.23.0 [1] with more features and of course a range of
bugfixes. Brad says chances are his recent speed uptake might slow down a bit
again going forward.

## xCurl

I got an email from someone asking about details around xCurl. I had no idea
what it was, but now I do and I blogged about it [2]. tldr: it's a Microsoft
game development kit based on the libcurl API, built on a old libcurl version
with a lot of custom patches applied from them.

## hacked into devices

I got another email from what sounds to be from someone with maybe a mental
problem or something and I blogged about that [3] too. She starts out accusing
me of having "hacked into" her devices and then goes into a long side-track
about ... yeah, I'm not really sure.

## symbols

I made sure all libcurl symbols (defines, enums and typdefs) are presented on
the curl site properly sorted by name [4] or by version the were introduced in
[5], complete with links to where they belong.

## OpenSSL

After OpenSSL's 3.2 release last week several people have asked about curl's
plans for supporting HTTP/3 using their QUIC implementation. I answered one of
them in a multi-paragraph response here [6], but the gist is that no one has
started that work and it is not considered "easy". Hopefully we can find
someone to sponsor this work so we can have someone spend proper time and
energy to get it going.

## Coming up

- curl 8.5.0 on Wednesday, including video release presentation live-streamed

## Links

[1] = https://c-ares.org/
[2] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/11/30/xcurl/
[3] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/11/26/you-have-hacked-into-my-devices/
[4] = https://curl.se/libcurl/c/symbols-by-name.html
[5] = https://curl.se/libcurl/c/symbols-in-versions.html
[6] = https://github.com/curl/curl/discussions/12425
[7] = https://mastodon.social/@bagder/111493924165391163

-- 

  / daniel.haxx.se