[Daniel's week] November 1, 2024

[Daniel Stenberg]

Hello,

Let me tell you about some of the things that happened in my world this week.

## FOSDEM

I have booked hotel and flights to FOSDEM 2025 [2]. I am already looking
forward to meeting up with both new and old friends there. And give away
plenty of curl stickers of course.

I have not yet figured out any talks to do there. If you have an idea of what
you think I should blab about in a cold Brussels in February, let me know.

## ABI stability

On the day of the eighteen's anniversary of the last SONAME bump in curl I
blogged about it [1] and how important I think it is. The stability I mean,
not the anniversary.

## source code age

I worked a little this week on visualizing code age in curl. Posted my work in
progress updates on Mastodon which helped me get feedback and iterate on the
look. I ended up posted a blog post [3] about it - I think the final version
looks pretty cool. I like how it shows how old code gets compressed and kind
of squeezed over time until only the real gems remain, and new code
continuously replaces everything else on top. This new graph is now up on the
curl dashboard.

As a little extra bonus, Linux kernel developer Kees Cook got inspired [4],
and rewrote my scripts into something that performed better on such a large
project and is now working on producing something similar for the kernel code.
We have not yet seen a final version of that. I'm looking forward to it!

## release prep

The pending curl release happens on Wednesday so I'm doing the regular
preparations to ensure a smooth process. We have one pending severity low CVE
to announce.

## hackerone

We keep having a few open issues with ongoing discussions and clarifications,
but none of them we have there right now probably will get a CVE.

## slowember

A heads up. I will be slower than normal during this month hence known as
slowember. After next week there will be three consecutive weeks with me being
away traveling. One week work, two weeks vacation. I will not be completely
vanished and I am not the only one that can make things happen in curl, but
things will most likely slow down a little due to this.

## deleting cookies

Over on the HTTPbis mailing list, Yoav Weiss kicked off a discussion thread
[6] by proposing a new HTTP header for deleting cookies.

The comments on the list mostly focused on exactly which cookies a server
would be allowed to delete while most of the comments on my Mastodon post that
I saw were more positive and in the style of "finally".

I'm not sure how much of a problem these "lost cookies" actually are out in
the real world outside of Google properties though, if this actually is a
challenge big enough to warrant this new header and the whole machinery that
will follow with gradually updated clients made to support this over the
coming years. The problem is probably primarily visible in browsers, so maybe
it will not matter too much for other cookie-using clients?

## Rock-solid

Stay tuned for the announcement of the long term support version of curl in
the coming week. We call it Rock-solid curl [5].

## MVP

Remember that I was awarded to join the club of Microsoft Most Valuable
Professionals [5] a while back? As I am sure you wonder what kind of goodness
and amount of party invites this has given me so far, I figure I should give a
brief report:

I now get a huge amount of invites to participate in various teem meetings (in
US centric time zones) where every imaginable Microsoft product and technology
is presented, discussed or show-cased. The enterprise smell is eye-wateringly
thick and half the invite emails consist of NDA reminders.

I have yet to see anything that is even slightly interesting to someone like
me who does not care one iota about Microsoft proprietary products. It might
of course have gotten lost in the flood.

I feel like a UFO; totally lost and with no similar-minded soul involved.
Totally misplaced.

Luckily, I can decide to just watch the spectacle and not get involved.
Hopefully there will show up something fun later on.

## Coming up

  - curl release on Wednesday (with CVE announcement)
  - curl release video live-stream after the release
  - Rock-solid curl announcement
  - attending the Polhem Prize 2024 award ceremony

## Links

[1] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/10/30/eighteen-years-of-abi-stability/
[2] = https://fosdem.org/2025/
[3] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/10/31/curl-source-code-age/
[4] = https://fosstodon.org/@kees/113404511762344971
[5] = https://rock-solid.curl.dev/
[6] = https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2024OctDec/0147.html


-- 

  / daniel.haxx.se