[Daniel's week] September 29, 2023

[Daniel Stenberg]

Hello friends!

And what do you know? I managed to keep myself busy this week as well...

## German article

After I did an interview, the now rather old bogus CVE story was published by
the German site tagesspiegel.de [1]. I'm providing an unofficial English
translation of it [2].

## IPFS

We finally merged the IPFS gateway support PR [3] in curl and as what seems to
be customary these days it was subsequently discussed on hacker news [4].

The bulk of the work was done by Mark Gaiser who patiently worked on this PR
for over 500 days before it was merged. This work introduced curl's 258th
command line option...

## SVT

The Swedish public service television company SVT published a report called
"The State of FLOSS at SVT" [5], in which I was happy to find a reference to
my work Uncurled [6] in on page 27 in the "Further reading and resources"
section. It makes me happy my work on that is appreciated and helps others
understand and "tackle" Open Source.

## world map

I toyed with making a curl world map [6] with the world made up entirely of
the curl logo :// symbol. The plan is to use it in a future presentation.

## website polish

John Haugabook brought this lovely improvement of the curl website: when
browsing the man page [7], you get a fancy menu on the top-left corner that
lets you easily select command line options to read up about.

Additionally, I introduced a brand new page on the site that shows which curl
command line options that were added in in versions [8]. Meant to make it
easier to figure out how old/new options are and help users figure out if
options are sensible to use in scripts and what not.

Not exactly website oriented, but it certainly helps the site as well, I did
a major overhaul this week of all (almost 500) curl man pages and how we
provide "SEE ALSO" references in them. I changed the format for them and I
then made sure they are all verified to look correctly and to reference an
existing curl man page, better catching typos or just wrongly formatted
references. This of course helps rendering the docs even better on the
site. This was a monster-edit that took several hours of using crafty editor
macros, but I think it improved the situation.

As a final bonus this week, I added a FAQ entry for "How do I upgrade curl.exe
in Windows?" [9] in an attempt to help answer that question better.

## configure vs cmake

We added support for building curl with cmake back in 2009, but configure has
remained the most feature-complete build option for curl ever since. This week
we got the bright idea to create a CI job [10] that generates the config
header file using both methods and then compare how they differ.

It immediately turned out to be a winner concept and gave us a good TODO list
of things to improve, for both configure and cmake. We have already fixed a
whole range of differences and there are more to fix. Slowly making curl
builds a little bit better, step by step.

It will not make them feature-complete exactly, but this helps us make the
default builds with either be more similar.

## Coming up

- start working on my coming monster libcurl video tutorial
- review and merge PRs

## Links

[1] = https://background.tagesspiegel.de/cybersecurity/gefangen-im-prozess-der-schwachstellenmeldung
[2] = https://gist.github.com/bagder/59464b7e95851902ce41e12d7ce0f812
[3] = https://curl.se/bug/?i=8805
[4] = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37628525
[5] = https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7112013068062093312/
[6] = https://mastodon.social/@bagder/111143438131949106
[7] = https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html
[8] = https://curl.se/docs/optionswhen.html
[9] = https://curl.se/docs/faq.html#How_do_I_upgrade_curl_exe_in_Win
[10] = https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/11964

-- 

  / daniel.haxx.se