Daniel Stenberg wrote:
> I went to FSCONS[1] this weekend and held a 45 minute talk on curl and
> libcurl (in English!). I hope that there will be a video available
> soonish that was taken at the event, but I've also published my slides
> from it at:
>
> http://daniel.haxx.se/curl-20071208.pdf

The "OS- and Linux- distros" slide doesn't put the distros in a good
light, I see :-/ What could we (curl maintainers at various distros) do
to improve this..?

"lagging behind terribly at times" -> The problem is that people are
always conservative about updating libraries that are used by several
applications in the system, because it might cause this and that, and
don't fix it if it's not broken. In SUSE, this is even worse, because
the package management library uses libcurl for downloading packages, so
add "what if online updates suddenly break" to the above. So the result
is usually an old curl with a pile of patches for bugs that were either
really annoying or security related. For openSUSE, people can download
newer curl packages built for older dists from the buildservice (and I
guess other distros have a similar option), but of course the average
user is not interested in that at all. Perhaps we could make the newer
packages more visible, so that at least developers use something recent.
Probably updating the SUSE table on http://curl.haxx.se/download.html
should be the first step from my side :) (will send details later).

Which leads to another point, that bugreports against the distro
packages are often of no use for you, because it involves code that is
months or years old. I try to forward valid bugreports to curl-library,
but it always takes some time to verify whether the bugreport applies to
the current code or not. I don't know what's better, forward more bugs
faster (inc. false reports), or weed out false reports (at some time cost)?

"don't contribute in any particular extent" -> well, yes. I (try to) fix
some of the bugs that go through the SUSE bugzilla, not much time for
more interesting stuff, because there are other duties :(. I gues others
are in a similar position. (actually, I recently started working on a
hack in libcurl, I'll post details when it's somehow usable, in January
probably.)

"not always good at telling where things come from (= they didn't create
this thing)" -> ?? What did you mean by this point? I'm not sure I
understand it and the video is not yet available...

so long,
Michal
Received on 2007-12-12