[Daniel's week] February 24, 2023

[Daniel Stenberg]

Hi friends,

## release

Doing a release on a Monday is perhaps not the ideal day because it forced me
to spend more time on the weekend to make sure all my ducks were in a row. The
final Windows related bugfix was merged early Monday morning just before I
packaged and uploaded the new release. Also not ideal, but I really wanted the
bug fixed in this release!

This time the release went smoother and now several days after we have seen a
few bugreports on the new release but none of the serious kind we saw for the
previous release. I think we can conclude that there will be no more version
seven releases and instead we are now running ahead towards the version eight
release on March 20.

## new machine

Once the release was out I could finally do the dev machine switch and since
Monday the new machine is now my new primary development box. The transition
turned out really smooth and now several days later I have still not ran into
any into major snag so overall just a very convenient step. This new beast
builds curl almost 5 times faster than my old PC.

## security

We have received a few security reports this week about potential security
problems from two reporters. Left for me is now to assess if they truly are
security problems and if so, how serious. It is hard and difficult work.

## live-coding

I revived my live-coding this week and did two three-hour sessions [1] in 
which I worked on bugs, merged other people's pull-requests and submitted 
numerous pull-requests of my own. Fairly productive sessions actually, and 
they also turned out to be fairly well viewed as over a thousand unique 
visitors viewed at least a part of the Thursday version!

Live-coding is difficult as I need to talk, work on the code, make sure the
right stuff is visible on screen and think at the same time.

The chat and people's questions and feedback make it all really fun and
worthwhile.

## reducing sscanf

Recently I've turned unhappy with the frequent use of sscanf() in the curl
code and I have started to slowly rewrite functions to transition away from
those calls. sscanf() itself is not really bad, but the function call is slow,
many times the parser accepts a little bit more than maybe intended and
sometimes the pattern and what it does is really hard to understand. I just
have this gut feeling that we migth have some hidden bug somewhere in our uses
of ssscanf() just because of this.

## lists.haxx.se

Someone pointed out to be that some of the mailing list pages and forms for
mailman that appear on the `lists.haxx.se` site were using http://
URLs. Apparently they could make browsers show warnings in some situations,
even if use HSTS on the HTTPS version of the site so very few (if any)
requests would actually ever get sent to the unencrypted version of the site.

Anyway, after some digging into the details I figure out how to update the
entire site and all individual mailing lists to use HTTPS URLs.

I have a local Mailman 2 instance built from source that I use for this. It
even uses a local Python 2 build, since Python 2 has been dropped from Debian
and Mailman 2 does not work with later Python versions and the successor
Mailman 3 is such a completely different thing and monster to install and
upgrade to that I gave up trying.

## stickers

I explained before how I ran out of curl stickers at FOSDEM 2023 and I ordered
a new set that arrived at my house this week. A big box of stickers.

## podcast

We recorded the initial pilot episode of our foss related podcast today
February 24. There are just a few more details left to get done and before we
should be able to go public. We will then be most eager to get feedback and
suggestions on where to go with this, guests to invite and topics to
discuss. Here: https://github.com/fossified/podcast

## Blog posts

- 7.88.1 the second final one
   https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/02/20/7-88-1-the-second-final-one/

- My 2023 dev machine
   https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/02/20/my-2023-dev-machine/

- Restocked on stickers
   https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/02/23/restocked-on-stickers

## Coming up

- fix bugs, merge pull-requests

## Links

[1] = https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpXAyWkDQy43xYWkRVDvxyPxhLeHDxdmg

-- 

  / daniel.haxx.se