[Daniel's week] February 17, 2023

[Daniel Stenberg]

Hello!

## release

Things looked fine the days before the release and we shipped the supposed
last ever release of curl version 7 on the Wednesday, together with announcing
three security advisories.

I managed to complete my video presentation with that good feeling still
hanging on, but then everything took a different direction.

A data corruption bug was reported over on IRC and an intense work session
started. The symptoms: using latest libcurl with arch Linux' pacman
installation program, with a config allowing it to download files in parallel
would trigger it. It turned out difficult to trigger under any other scenarios
and that made it initially hard to wrap our minds around.

Stefan Eissing and Harry Sintonen worked fiercely through the day and well
into the night, and the following morning we had to pull-requests that
together had the issue fixed.

Additional details include that it requires HTTP/2 and multiplexed transfers
with small enough frames to get multiple frames for the same transfer into the
libcurl buffer, with more than one transfer in progress. This turned out
almost impossible to trigger with Apache httpd but not with nginx. Of course
it was also somewhat timing sensitive.

Due to the seriousness of the bug we quickly decided we should do a patch
release soon to help people avoid this.

## another release

We decided we do the patch release on Monday Feb 20. A second final version
seven release if you will. curl 7.88.1 it will be.

In this release we will of course fix the data corruption bug, but as there
are also other bugs reported and fixed we will merge more bugfixes. That's
also why we give it a few more days, as it allows us to collect more things to
address while we're doing a release anyway.

So, I'm back at preparing a release again, pretty much like I did last week.

## Birthday prep

I will arrange some kind of online "birthday party" on March 20 to celebrate
curl's 25th birthday and the 8.0.0 release which will happen on the same day.
The celebration is probably going to be an open Zoom meeting for anyone to
join and hang out at, at which I might do a curl presentation going through
the main events in the curl project over the twenty-five years it has
existed - as I have been the lead developer of the things during its entire
lifetime.

I will provide details, links and more at a later point. Stay tuned. The
celebration will happen in my early evening time, maybe 17:00 UTC or
something. What makes it complicated for US peeps is that this date is within
the period AFTER the US has switched to daylight saving time, but BEFORE
Europe has.

I have ordered myself a 25 year old single malt whiskey for the event.

## Sourcegraph

Half a year ago (!) I was a guest on the Sourcegraph podcast and this week the
episode eventually went public [1]. Lots of talk about how I got started with
computers and my journey from Commodore 64, via Amiga into unix and networking
programming etc. And of course lots of curl.

## Stickers

I mentioned previously how I completely drained my entire set of stickers
while at FOSDEM. This week I bounced some new sticker ideas with friends on
Mastodon before I ordered a new badge of curl stickers. I mostly ordered good
old trusted designs but I added two "limited edition" ones that came out as a
result of the brainstorm: one "can you curl it?" and one "yes we curl". I am
sure I won't be able to resist to post images of them when they arrive here.

## Elektroniktidningen

I previously made a magazine version in Swedish out of my blog post "IDN is
crazy" [3] for Elektroniktidningen that appeared in print a few weeks
ago. This article is now available online [2]. Perfect for practicing your
Swedish!

## Blog posts

  - curl 7.88.0 seven stops here
    https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/02/15/curl-7-88-0-seven-stops-here/

## Coming up

  - another release
  - switch dev machines and get some performance numbers

## Links

[1] = https://youtu.be/ZLtqHFxEDm8
[2] = https://etn.se/index.php/69777
[3] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/12/14/idn-is-crazy/

-- 

  / daniel.haxx.se