docs/HISTORY - platform/external/curl - Gitiles

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                              / __| | | | |_) | |
                             | (__| |_| |  _ <| |___
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 How cURL Became Like This
 =========================

 Towards the end of 1996, Daniel Stenberg was spending time writing an IRC bot
 for an Amiga related channel on EFnet. He then came up with the idea to make
 currency-exchange calculations available to Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
 users. All the necessary data are published on the Web; he just needed to
 automate their retrieval.

 Daniel simply adopted an existing command-line open-source tool, httpget, that
 Brazilian Rafael Sagula had written and recently release version 0.1 of. After
 a few minor adjustments, it did just what he needed.

 1997
 ----

 HttpGet 1.0 was released on April 8th 1997 with brand new HTTP proxy support.

 We soon found and fixed support for getting currencies over GOPHER.  Once FTP
 download support was added, the name of the project was changed and urlget 2.0
 was released in August 1997. The http-only days were already passed.

 1998
 ----

 The project slowly grew bigger. When upload capabilities were added and the
 name once again was misleading, a second name change was made and on March 20,
 1998 curl 4 was released. (The version numbering from the previous names was
 kept.)

 (Unrelated to this project a company called Curl Corporation registered a US
 trademark on the name "CURL" on May 18 1998. That company had then already
 registered the curl.com domain back in November of the previous year. All this
 was revealed to us much later.)

 SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library.

 August, first announcement of curl on freshmeat.net.

 October, with the curl 4.9 release and the introduction of cookie support,
 curl was no longer released under the GPL license. Now we're at 4000 lines of
 code, we switched over to the MPL license to restrict the effects of
 "copyleft".

 November, configure script and reported successful compiles on several
 major operating systems. The never-quite-understood -F option was added and
 curl could now simulate quite a lot of a browser. TELNET support was added.

 Curl 5 was released in December 1998 and introduced the first ever curl man
 page. People started making Linux RPM packages out of it.

 1999
 ----

 January, DICT support added.

 OpenSSL took over where SSLeay was abandoned.

 May, first Debian package.

 August, LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl web site gets 1300 visits
 weekly. Moved site to curl.haxx.nu.

 Released curl 6.0 in September. 15000 lines of code.

 December 28, added the project on Sourceforge and started using its services
 for managing the project.

 2000
 ----

 Spring 2000, major internal overhaul to provide a suitable library interface.
 The first non-beta release was named 7.1 and arrived in August. This offered
 the easy interface and turned out to be the beginning of actually getting
 other software and programs to get based on and powered by libcurl. Almost
 20000 lines of code.

 June 2000: the curl site moves to "curl.haxx.se"

 August, the curl web site gets 4000 visits weekly.

 The PHP guys adopted libcurl already the same month, when the first ever third
 party libcurl binding showed up. CURL has been a supported module in PHP since
 the release of PHP 4.0.2. This would soon get followers. More than 16
 different bindings exist at the time of this writing.

 September, kerberos4 support was added.

 In November started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later re-written
 from scratch again. The libcurl major SONAME number was set to 1.

 2001
 ----

 January, Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or
 MPL). The MIT license is extremely liberal and can be used combined with GPL
 in other projects. This would finally put an end to the "complaints" from
 people involved in GPLed projects that previously were prohibited from using
 libcurl while it was released under MPL only. (Due to the fact that MPL is
 deemed "GPL incompatible".)

 curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7, March 22 2001. This
 also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of
 code. The libcurl major SONAME number was bumped to 2 due to this overhaul.

 The first experimental ftps:// support was added in March 2001.

 August. curl is bundled in Mac OS X, 10.1. It was already becoming more and
 more of a standard utility of Linux distributions and a regular in the BSD
 ports collections. The curl web site gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation
 contacted Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have
 never since got in touch again.

 September, libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During the
 forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and
 without much whistles.

 2002
 ----

 June, the curl web site gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is
 35000 lines of code. Reported successful compiles on more than 40 combinations
 of CPUs and operating systems.

 To estimate number of users of the curl tool or libcurl library is next to
 impossible. Around 5000 downloaded packages each week from the main site gives
 a hint, but the packages are mirrored extensively, bundled with numerous OS
 distributions and otherwise retrieved as part of other software.

 September, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license
 only.

 2003
 ----

 January. Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds.

 February, the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given moment,
 there's an average of 3 people browsing the curl.haxx.se site.

 Multiple new authentication schemes are supported: Digest (May), NTLM (June)
 and Negotiate (June).

 November: curl 7.10.8 is released. 45000 lines of code. ~55000 unique visitors
 to the curl.haxx.se site. Five official web mirrors.

 December, full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported.

 2004
 ----

 January: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support.

 June: curl 7.12.0 introduced IDN support. 10 official web mirrors.

 This release bumped the major SONAME to 3 due to the removal of the
 curl_formparse() function

 August: Curl and libcurl 7.12.1

     Public curl release number:               82
     Releases counted from the very beginning: 109
     Available command line options:           96
     Available curl_easy_setopt() options:     120
     Number of public functions in libcurl:    36
     Amount of public web site mirrors:        12
     Number of known libcurl bindings:         26

 2005
 ----

 April. GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is
 built.

 September: TFTP support was added.

 More than 100,000 unique visitors of the curl web site. 25 mirrors.

 December: security vulnerability: libcurl URL Buffer Overflow

 2006
 ----

 January. We dropped support for Gopher. We found bugs in the implementation
 that turned out having been introduced years ago, so with the conclusion that
 nobody had found out in all this time we removed it instead of fixing it.

 March: security vulnerability: libcurl TFTP Packet Buffer Overflow

 April: Added the multi_socket() API

 September: The major SONAME number for libcurl was bumped to 4 due to the
 removal of ftp third party transfer support.

 November: Added SCP and SFTP support

 2007
 ----

 February: Added support for the Mozilla NSS library to do the SSL/TLS stuff

 July: security vulnerability: libcurl GnuTLS insufficient cert verification

 2008
 ----

 November:

     Command line options:         128
     curl_easy_setopt() options:   158
     Public functions in libcurl:  58
     Known libcurl bindings:       37
     Contributors:                 683

  145,000 unique visitors. >100 GB downloaded.

 2009
 ----

 March: security vulnerability: libcurl Arbitrary File Access

 August: security vulnerability: libcurl embedded zero in cert name

 December: Added support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP

 2010
 ----

 January: Added support for RTSP

 February: security vulnerability: libcurl data callback excessive length

 March: The project switched over to use git (hosted by github) instead of CVS
 for source code control

 May: Added support for RTMP

 Added support for PolarSSL to do the SSL/TLS stuff

 August:

     Public curl releases:         117
     Command line options:         138
     curl_easy_setopt() options:   180
     Public functions in libcurl:  58
     Known libcurl bindings:       39
     Contributors:                 808

  Gopher support added (re-added actually)

 2012
 ----

  July: Added support for Schannel (native Windows TLS backend) and Darwin SSL
  (Native Mac OS X and iOS TLS backend).

  Supports metalink

  October: SSH-agent support.

 2013
 ----

  February: Cleaned up internals to always uses the "multi" non-blocking
  approach internally and only expose the blocking API with a wrapper.

  September: First small steps on supporting HTTP/2 with nghttp2.

  October: Removed krb4 support.

  December: Happy eyeballs.

 2014
 ----

  March: first real release supporting HTTP/2

  September: Web site had 245,000 unique visitors and served 236GB data
	_ _ ____ _
	___\| \| \| \| _ \\| \|
	/ __\| \| \| \| \|_) \| \|
	\| (__\| \|_\| \| _ <\| \|___
	\___\|\___/\|_\| \_\_____\|

	How cURL Became Like This
	=========================

	Towards the end of 1996, Daniel Stenberg was spending time writing an IRC bot
	for an Amiga related channel on EFnet. He then came up with the idea to make
	currency-exchange calculations available to Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
	users. All the necessary data are published on the Web; he just needed to
	automate their retrieval.

	Daniel simply adopted an existing command-line open-source tool, httpget, that
	Brazilian Rafael Sagula had written and recently release version 0.1 of. After
	a few minor adjustments, it did just what he needed.

	1997
	----

	HttpGet 1.0 was released on April 8th 1997 with brand new HTTP proxy support.

	We soon found and fixed support for getting currencies over GOPHER. Once FTP
	download support was added, the name of the project was changed and urlget 2.0
	was released in August 1997. The http-only days were already passed.

	1998
	----

	The project slowly grew bigger. When upload capabilities were added and the
	name once again was misleading, a second name change was made and on March 20,
	1998 curl 4 was released. (The version numbering from the previous names was
	kept.)

	(Unrelated to this project a company called Curl Corporation registered a US
	trademark on the name "CURL" on May 18 1998. That company had then already
	registered the curl.com domain back in November of the previous year. All this
	was revealed to us much later.)

	SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library.

	August, first announcement of curl on freshmeat.net.

	October, with the curl 4.9 release and the introduction of cookie support,
	curl was no longer released under the GPL license. Now we're at 4000 lines of
	code, we switched over to the MPL license to restrict the effects of
	"copyleft".

	November, configure script and reported successful compiles on several
	major operating systems. The never-quite-understood -F option was added and
	curl could now simulate quite a lot of a browser. TELNET support was added.

	Curl 5 was released in December 1998 and introduced the first ever curl man
	page. People started making Linux RPM packages out of it.

	1999
	----

	January, DICT support added.

	OpenSSL took over where SSLeay was abandoned.

	May, first Debian package.

	August, LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl web site gets 1300 visits
	weekly. Moved site to curl.haxx.nu.

	Released curl 6.0 in September. 15000 lines of code.

	December 28, added the project on Sourceforge and started using its services
	for managing the project.

	2000
	----

	Spring 2000, major internal overhaul to provide a suitable library interface.
	The first non-beta release was named 7.1 and arrived in August. This offered
	the easy interface and turned out to be the beginning of actually getting
	other software and programs to get based on and powered by libcurl. Almost
	20000 lines of code.

	June 2000: the curl site moves to "curl.haxx.se"

	August, the curl web site gets 4000 visits weekly.

	The PHP guys adopted libcurl already the same month, when the first ever third
	party libcurl binding showed up. CURL has been a supported module in PHP since
	the release of PHP 4.0.2. This would soon get followers. More than 16
	different bindings exist at the time of this writing.

	September, kerberos4 support was added.

	In November started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later re-written
	from scratch again. The libcurl major SONAME number was set to 1.

	2001
	----

	January, Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or
	MPL). The MIT license is extremely liberal and can be used combined with GPL
	in other projects. This would finally put an end to the "complaints" from
	people involved in GPLed projects that previously were prohibited from using
	libcurl while it was released under MPL only. (Due to the fact that MPL is
	deemed "GPL incompatible".)

	curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7, March 22 2001. This
	also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of
	code. The libcurl major SONAME number was bumped to 2 due to this overhaul.

	The first experimental ftps:// support was added in March 2001.

	August. curl is bundled in Mac OS X, 10.1. It was already becoming more and
	more of a standard utility of Linux distributions and a regular in the BSD
	ports collections. The curl web site gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation
	contacted Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have
	never since got in touch again.

	September, libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During the
	forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and
	without much whistles.

	2002
	----

	June, the curl web site gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is
	35000 lines of code. Reported successful compiles on more than 40 combinations
	of CPUs and operating systems.

	To estimate number of users of the curl tool or libcurl library is next to
	impossible. Around 5000 downloaded packages each week from the main site gives
	a hint, but the packages are mirrored extensively, bundled with numerous OS
	distributions and otherwise retrieved as part of other software.

	September, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license
	only.

	2003
	----

	January. Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds.

	February, the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given moment,
	there's an average of 3 people browsing the curl.haxx.se site.

	Multiple new authentication schemes are supported: Digest (May), NTLM (June)
	and Negotiate (June).

	November: curl 7.10.8 is released. 45000 lines of code. ~55000 unique visitors
	to the curl.haxx.se site. Five official web mirrors.

	December, full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported.

	2004
	----

	January: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support.

	June: curl 7.12.0 introduced IDN support. 10 official web mirrors.

	This release bumped the major SONAME to 3 due to the removal of the
	curl_formparse() function

	August: Curl and libcurl 7.12.1

	Public curl release number: 82
	Releases counted from the very beginning: 109
	Available command line options: 96
	Available curl_easy_setopt() options: 120
	Number of public functions in libcurl: 36
	Amount of public web site mirrors: 12
	Number of known libcurl bindings: 26

	2005
	----

	April. GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is
	built.

	September: TFTP support was added.

	More than 100,000 unique visitors of the curl web site. 25 mirrors.

	December: security vulnerability: libcurl URL Buffer Overflow

	2006
	----

	January. We dropped support for Gopher. We found bugs in the implementation
	that turned out having been introduced years ago, so with the conclusion that
	nobody had found out in all this time we removed it instead of fixing it.

	March: security vulnerability: libcurl TFTP Packet Buffer Overflow

	April: Added the multi_socket() API

	September: The major SONAME number for libcurl was bumped to 4 due to the
	removal of ftp third party transfer support.

	November: Added SCP and SFTP support

	2007
	----

	February: Added support for the Mozilla NSS library to do the SSL/TLS stuff

	July: security vulnerability: libcurl GnuTLS insufficient cert verification

	2008
	----

	November:

	Command line options: 128
	curl_easy_setopt() options: 158
	Public functions in libcurl: 58
	Known libcurl bindings: 37
	Contributors: 683

	145,000 unique visitors. >100 GB downloaded.

	2009
	----

	March: security vulnerability: libcurl Arbitrary File Access

	August: security vulnerability: libcurl embedded zero in cert name

	December: Added support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP

	2010
	----

	January: Added support for RTSP

	February: security vulnerability: libcurl data callback excessive length

	March: The project switched over to use git (hosted by github) instead of CVS
	for source code control

	May: Added support for RTMP

	Added support for PolarSSL to do the SSL/TLS stuff

	August:

	Public curl releases: 117
	Command line options: 138
	curl_easy_setopt() options: 180
	Public functions in libcurl: 58
	Known libcurl bindings: 39
	Contributors: 808

	Gopher support added (re-added actually)

	2012
	----

	July: Added support for Schannel (native Windows TLS backend) and Darwin SSL
	(Native Mac OS X and iOS TLS backend).

	Supports metalink

	October: SSH-agent support.

	2013
	----

	February: Cleaned up internals to always uses the "multi" non-blocking
	approach internally and only expose the blocking API with a wrapper.

	September: First small steps on supporting HTTP/2 with nghttp2.

	October: Removed krb4 support.

	December: Happy eyeballs.

	2014
	----

	March: first real release supporting HTTP/2

	September: Web site had 245,000 unique visitors and served 236GB data