[Daniel's week] March 29, 2024

[Daniel Stenberg]

Hello!

We've had a national holiday here today but the week has been packed like most 
weeks...

## distros

I put in some extra effort and managed to put together a "report" from the
curl distro meeting last week, that I blogged on Monday [1]. I had to get that
out of the way so that I could get the release preparations going.

As a direct consequence of the meeting I already created and announced a new
mailing list called curl-distros. This list is meant for communication between
the curl project members and distros and between distros that ship curl. I
also made the mailing list archive available on the website.

I have some minor polish left to make the mailing list info page look better
integrated into the site but there is no hurry to get that done.

## releases

I did two curl releases this week [6]. The tarballs show a 1h16 gap between
them and I am pretty sure this is one of the fastest follow-up patch releases
I have ever done.

I packaged, uploaded and announced the 8.7.0 release according to procedures
and things went about just as normal. It took 53 minutes until someone
reported an issue [2]: the file src/tool_hugehelp.c in the tarball did not
look right. Argh. I immediately understood what mistake I had made and I saw
no other easy way out from this than to make an quick follow-up release. A
release is immutable so I cannot fix 8.7.0 but I could make a 8.7.1. I
repaired the file in my local environment and redid the release dance and soon
I had uploaded and announce curl 8.7.1. I managed to land a single commit in
between (a documentation update), but there were not a single code change
between the two releases. I only made sure that the mentioned file was
generated correctly.

Oh, and yes I have since also updated the release procedure document to
include the initial step that should make it less likely that I will reproduce
this mistake in the future.

You would otherwise perhaps think that I would not do this kind of mistake the
255th time I make a curl release, but I suppose maybe it has also lead me to
be a little too confident maybe... oh well, in the end not too many was hurt
by this and basically everyone could skip the dot-zero release and go straight
to the fixed .1 version.

## curl up

I visited the planned curl up venue on Wednesday afternoon and I think it
seems like a nice and comfy place to run the event in. I have given them my
thumbs up and I have updated the curl up webpage [3] with pointers and
address. It is located in central Stockholm close to a subway station.

If you want to come to curl up, please remember to register on the link so
that we get a proper clue as early as possible about what attendance to count
on.

The tentative agenda is also growing pretty nicely and now contains of over
ten separate presentations.

## webinar

Twenty-five persons or so attended by "getting started with libcurl" webinar
on the Wednesday [4]. I went through libcurl basics and described how to get
your first internet transfers done using the API.

## c-ares

Today (Friday) I packaged and uploaded c-ares 1.28.0 [4]. As usual, all the
heavy lifting has been done by awesome contributors, nowadays I mostly just do
the releases in this project.

## 10k days

Today is exactly 10,000 days since httpget 0.1 was first released. I
celebrated this by writing a blog post about how we have also fixed 10,000
bugs during this time [5].

## xz

The xz backdoor news hit this afternoon [7]. I feel this might change things.

## Coming up

- European Daylight Saving time switch on Sunday
- National holiday on Monday
- Open Source CNA users group meeting Friday
- curl feature window opens on Saturday

## Links

[1] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/03/25/curl-distro-report/
[2] = https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/13195
[3] = https://github.com/curl/curl-up/wiki/2024
[4] = https://c-ares.org/
[5] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/03/29/10000-bugfixes-in-10000-days/
[6] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/03/27/curl-8-7-0/
[7] = https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4


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  / daniel.haxx.se