[Daniel's week] June 21, 2024

[Daniel Stenberg]

Hi friends.

I had today off as we celebrate "Midsummer" in Sweden and it's national 
holiday. Had a great day mostly away from the keyboard. Still managed to do 
some things this week.

## survey

After countless hours of work I published the 63 page document I call the
"curl user survey 2024 analysis" [1]. There are fun details in the there and
quite a large amount of user feedback. I intend to go back to it the coming
weeks and see what good nuggets I can extract from there and put into my
personal TODO list.

## podcast

I guested the podcast Changelog and friends [2] this week. It was my fifth
visit with the guys and as always it was great fun. We talked perhaps mostly
about curl, no surprise there, but we also touched a bunch of other topics
that maybe I don't always talk about in public. Check it out!

## Steam DB

Someone pointed out this database of Steam games using curl so I wrote up a
blog post about the fact that apparently more than 22K game titles do it [3].
There's no secret that curl is widely used but sometimes figuring out numbers
and realizing a whole new universe of large scale usage makes my head spin.

It was also brought up on hacker news [5].

## everything curl

I took care of some of the outstanding issues and documented some still
missing details. While doing that I found a few what I thought was some
inconsistencies in the chapter layout and thus also subsequently refactored a
number of sections to make them appear in a more sensible order and in correct
sections. Since I also found more stuff that is not yet detailed in the book,
I think the net count of open issues eventually remained roughly the same
through the week.

Everything curl [4] now clocks in at 112,476 words.

## hackerone

The three issues from last Friday were all dismissed and since then we had 
three more arriving. One issue is now a confirmed security vulnerability that 
we will publish in association with our pending next release; probably at 
severity medium.

## feature window closes

Tomorrow Saturday the curl feature window closes for this cycle. We count no 
less than eleven changes already merged [6] this time around and I don't 
expect us to merge any more before the chance is up.

## -vv

We often see users trying to use multiple -v in curl command line invokes to 
get more logging because lots of tools work like that. -v gives a little, -vv 
gives a little more debug output and -vvv gives even more. curl does not work 
that way; -v is a mere boolean. You can only really switch on once and 
switching on many more times does not make any more enabled.

This *may* change going forward, as Stefan Eissing has now submitted a PR [7] 
that makes curl actually support different debug levels for a different amount 
of -v on the command line.

It is certainly food for thought and a subject open for discussion - I think 
it is intriguing. I want to allow people to comment on it and those who want 
to try it out before we make a final decision if this is the way we want to go 
and if this PR does it the right way. What do you think?

## CPU vs accuracy

On the libcurl mailing list we have learned about this interesting "battle" 
recently. A while ago we improved libcurl's limit-rate accuracy. The set a 
transfer rate that you wish libcurl to stay below even though it *could* 
transfer data faster. Later, someone discovered that by adding this higher 
accuracy, it also uses more CPU [8] and now the second person argues that he 
would rather have libcurl use less CPU and get less accurate limit rate 
accuracy.

It looks like a clear case of one vs the other where they both cannot be true 
at the same time and where none of the answers are clearly wrong or right but 
just different priorities.

The discussion is not over and no decision has been made, but it feels like 
there is a risk for a pending new option... or a tweaking of an existing one. 
It's a tricky balance.

## Coming up

- Saturday: closing feature window
- Work on weird HTTP Negotiate authentication problem for customer
- Continued work on curl packaging for Q*
- Merge Stefan's graceful TLS shutdown PR

## Links

[1] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/06/17/curl-user-survey-2024-analysis/
[2] = https://changelog.com/friends/49
[3] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/06/20/inside-22734-steam-games/
[4] = https://everything.curl.dev/
[5] = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40737349
[6] = https://curl.se/dev/release-notes.html
[7] = https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/13977
[8] = https://curl.se/mail/lib-2024-06/0044.html



-- 

  / daniel.haxx.se