Curl 8.0.1

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/03/20/curl-8-0-1-because-i-jinxed-it/

by tapanjk • 3 years ago

196 93 3 years ago

daniel.haxx.se

st_goliath• 3 years ago

I guess this should be the revert he mentioned, for those interested:

https://github.com/curl/curl/commit/c2df780a97d9913eb20a55d4...

danwee2• 3 years ago

I'm a nobody, but surprises me that the revert (and so the original feature) didn't include any tests. I always imagined that a project like curl (no deadlines? no pressure? no bosses?) would lead to people to work on it at their own pace (so more tests maybe? Maybe not, I don't know)

shawabawa3• 3 years ago

It was a performance optimisation, so I suppose it should be covered by existing tests as there should be no change in behaviour

withinboredom• 3 years ago

This looks like an integration point, which are pointless to test.

e12e• 3 years ago

It did in-fact have test coverage, from tfa:

Apart form the little bug that caused it to crash in several test cases. (...)
Exactly why this was not discovered in our tests and CI jobs before the release we have yet to figure out, but it is certainly more than just a little disturbing.

hyperman12• 3 years ago

I always find it a small miracle that you can yank an individual git commit out of a program, and end up with a working program. If I commit anything, follow-up commits quickly make the original quickly a hard requirement.

Maybe it is a sign of bigger and more stable source code, that individual commits influence each other less.

eptcyka• 3 years ago

Working on new, small bits of software often implies that a single commit will be more relevant to the rest of the codebase. The more code there is, the less any one particular line, on average, would matter.

vocram• 3 years ago

Making smaller and atomic commits makes them more easily reversible.

SushiHippie• 3 years ago

Should've instantly bumped it to version 9.0.0 instead of 8.0.1

artemonster• 3 years ago

Since there is no /s at the end I will assume it was not a joke. Most versioning schemes assume logic behind bumping numbers, please check for example „semantic versioning 2.0.0“

danielskogly• 3 years ago

I think the parent might be referring to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35228608

aew4ytasghe5• 3 years ago

The joke is 8.0.0 did not break API.

jve• 3 years ago

Is there a commitment from curl to use semver? If not, all the discussions about why the bump to v8 is void. We know a huge project that doesn't stick to semver and update major version whenever they want: Linux Kernel.

Ofcourse we wish everyone would use semver...

shaftoe444• 3 years ago

Since there is no /s at the end I will assume it was not a joke

Definitely a sane policy on the internet.

rwky• 3 years ago

Or copy what Windows did and jump straight to 10!

RedShift1• 3 years ago

Curl 98 SE was the best Curl.

amelius4• 3 years ago

I personally use wget because you can download files without any extra flags.

stonewhite• 3 years ago

Curl more equivalent to cat as a unix tool, making it easier to use in pipes. If your only use case is downloading then wget might look more practical

KyeRussell• 3 years ago

Yup. curl for when I want to see it, wget for when I want to save it. No shame.

layer8• 3 years ago

Or `wget -S` when you want to save it AND see the headers.

msravi2• 3 years ago

alias wget="curl -sL -O --no-clobber"

Update: Based on comments from @xorcist and @stabbles:

alias wget="curl -fLsS --no-clobber --remote-name-all"

amelius4• 3 years ago

Or just use wget ;)

stabbles2• 3 years ago

Not the same... you need: `-S` to print error messages and `-f` to return exit code on non-200 responses.

Also, --no-clobber is very recent (v7.83), so unlikely to work in general.

So `curl -fLOsS ...`

xorcist• 3 years ago

That will only download the first argument. You need

  --remote-name-all

instead of -O (--remote-name) to download all arguments files. It was in my opinion a mistake in the curl cli that remote-name works like output and needs to be repeated for each url. Remote-name-all is what rename-name should have been all along.

kevincox• 3 years ago

    curl https://example/file >file

thih93• 3 years ago

But what if you want to send an API request?

stabbles2• 3 years ago

Bumping the major version for fun is actually a pain, since configure scripts set upperbounds on major versions to be future-proof, anticipating breaking changes. Now it's just another edge case to deal with, and old versions of curl-dependents to patch.

sethammons2• 3 years ago

I'd rather deal with that than the team at Google who maintains the grpc Go library who are more than fine breaking the public API in minor changes.

https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/issues/3798

tqkxzugoaupvwqr• 3 years ago

If you read the first comment, you’ll see the API was documented as being experimental.

https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/issues/3798#issuecomment-670...

Karellen• 3 years ago

I thought the 8.0.0 was justified by dropping support for platforms without 64-bit integer types?

Dropping support for a group of platforms is definitely something I'd consider a breaking change.

sigzero• 3 years ago

I do not consider that a breaking change because they are no longer supported. Prior versions of the application will still run. Breaking changes to me are at the API level for SUPPORTED platforms.

justeleblanc• 3 years ago

That's only true for a small portion of software released. I have an idea about where this fixation in semver comes from, but I can't really believe that everyone here is a web dev who wasn't around before semver started getting traction.

avgcorrection• 3 years ago

It isn’t “for fun”.[1] The project apparently just doesn’t support the versioning scheme that you allude to.

If you want this project to use a particular versioning scheme then you should just argue for that directly.

[1] Other than this snippet :) : “on curl’s 25th birthday made it extra fun”

nottorp• 3 years ago

Exactly why this was not discovered in our tests and CI jobs before the release we have yet to figure out

Oh, just because the tests can't imagine what the environment on all those hundreds of millions of client machines is :)

rkta5• 3 years ago

Looking at the comment section I feel assured that comments are a thing of the past. I wonder if those people would take the hurdle to send an email instead.

anoonmoose2• 3 years ago

The death of the comment section has been greatly exaggerated...one comment, that the moderator didn't even see fit to remove. Ain't much.

Also funny that you wonder if people would take the hurdle to send an email instead. In this particular case, the author has in fact written about the torrent of email abuse he faces on multiple occasions, for example here [1]. Is his 2021 post evidence that email is a thing of the past?

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/

rkta5• 3 years ago

one comment, that the moderator didn't even see fit to remove. Ain't much.

It's not only about the comments we can see, but also about those comments that get filtered out by the moderator

Also funny that you wonder if people would take the hurdle to send an email instead.

Of course you also get non-friendly emails. I was wondering if the people that leave those comments would send an email instead.

edent• 3 years ago

From experience, yes. "Those" people will send an email, add you on LinkedIn, and call you landline if they don't like the content of your blog.

TechBro86152• 3 years ago

You mean the single flagged comment? There are more comments talking about the bad comments than there are bad comments.

rkta5• 3 years ago

At the time I wrote my comment here there were only one comment from Taran telling us what he gives about the topic and Daniel's reply to it. Should have made this more clear. It was to expect that comments will explode from HN visitors.

LoganDark3• 3 years ago

This happens every single time I make a new major release of a piece of software I maintain. There is always some mistake—even a typo in documentation—and it's the tiniest possible mistake, and there is always only exactly one mistake, but it's always enough to bug me so much that I have to make a patch release just to fix the one single mistake.

Some software developers are just cursed.

junon2• 3 years ago

Yep, have definitely done this once or twice with Chalk. I don't recall a time that a X.0.0 wasn't immediately followed up with an X.0.1 release for some dumb mistake I made.

more-coffee• 3 years ago

And that's why I never trust/use x.0.0 releases because they must have missed something :)

thih93• 3 years ago

Is not a curse, it’s probability and statistics. If you make a major release, you touch a lot of places and there’s a higher likelihood of introducing a bug.

LoganDark3• 3 years ago

I review it 10 times before I make the release and spot nothing, but then spot something only immediately after I release it. Just like how I can only spot typos in emails after I've already sent them.

jansommer• 3 years ago

Comment section reminds me of those for VLC. No clue why people complain about free stuff no one forces them to use. Like, just pay someone to implement DNSSEC if you really need that in curl, or write it yourself.

m4lvin• 3 years ago

Tried to leave a friendly comment, but apparently the database is hugged to death...

Replace this text with the error page you would like to serve to clients if your origin is offline.

Joker_vD2• 3 years ago

No clue why people complain about free stuff no one forces them to use

Just like roads. Nobody forces people to use them, you know; sure, some people might want to use them, to go for some place for some other non-road-related business but that's just their problem.

On a more serious note: people complain about "stuff" when they try to use that "stuff" to do something and it doesn't work no matter whether it's free or not, it's just human nature. As for "forced to use"... if you need to make a network request from command line, the options are basically curl or wget. Neither of them support your use case? Well, you can always just give up and not do whatever you intended to do, nobody forces you to achieve things anyhow.

Cthulhu_2• 3 years ago

Roads are not free, we pay taxes so that the government maintains them, like every other public utility.

Open source software is not a public utility and not paid for with tax money, therefore your analogy is flawed.

leshenka• 3 years ago

uhhhh i wonder why the guy behind curl doesn't have a responsive website. Yeah I get it, he's a c++ developer and web design is not his job but it's not that hard

garritfra• 3 years ago

LMAO

harrisi• 3 years ago

Bugs not being caught by tests seems like a big deal. I recently discovered a bug in the nodejs repl and couldn't get the tests to fail, even though there was a consistent infinite loop. It made me think about how many other tests are not surfacing bugs. It seems this is an example of at least one more.

Curl 8.0.1

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