Friends!

It is time for me to say Merry Christmas to you all and to withdraw from the
stage for the rest of this year. I am gonna spend christmas and the last days
of the year away from my busy mailbox and the curl project...

I'd like to take a moment to say something about the project's current state
and what I expect or think of the future. But first a quick glance in the
mirror, the last two year's biggest events that have put us where we are
today:

THE PAST
========

2000 (toally 14 public releases)

 17 Jan. Released curl 6.4. The first release in this millenium.

 21 Mar. Released curl 6.5.2. Long standing release that was truly solid,
         stable and has been used widely.

 7 Aug. After months of pre-releases the first public curl 7 release was
         made available. This started a new era in the curl project.
         Suddenly, people could use the libcurl to power their applications.

         The PHP4 module was among the first outside curl to integrate
         libcurl.

         The rest of the year was repeated and frequent releases.

 10 Nov. The first signs of the curl test suite

2001 (toally 12 public releases)

 4 Jan. Released curl 7.5.2.

 22 Mar. The perhaps biggest release since curl 7. With curl 7.7, we
         introduced persistant connections support.

 22 Apr. Released curl 7.7.2. This release was later to appear in the public
         releases of Mac OS X 10.1. Apple dropped wget and took on curl for
         their packages. Rumours claim this was due to licensing.

 7 Jun. Released curl 7.8. This release was later to appear in the
         first CD of the public release of Redhat Linux 7.2.

 23 Sep. Released curl 7.9. Now, with better cookie support and SSL session
         ID caching.

 - Started discussing a new, non-blocking interface for libcurl. It
         should allow "pull" style driving and it should allow multiple
         simultaneos file transfers in the same thread. I've dubbed it the
         "multi interface".

 5 Dec. Curl 7.9.2. The last release 2001.

 18 Dec. Posted a small announement mail about my successful tests using the
         first partly working code for the multi interface.

FUTURE
======

 Ok, let's try to envision what the future holds for project curl. Please
don't take anything of thise very seriously and don't consider this to be a
very strict guide line of what actually will happen. This project has never
been planned ahead very much and I don't intend to do that in the future
either. We go with the flow, we go where we want to go and where we think it
should go.

 o The multi interface. After a few more version 7 releases, we release curl
   version 8 a couple of months into 2002. The multi interface is gonna
   attract a bunch of newly interested people to our community.

 o General library improvements. We have several good ideas listed already.
   Given enough interest and help from people with skills, we will continue
   to offer a rock-solid library and tool, while at the same time expanding
   to new audiences.

 o More and better bindings for other languages. Some of the APIs offered
   today are a bit crude and rely heavily on the C API docs. This makes them
   hard to use at best. I think we'll see this getting improved.

 o More library competition. We can argue about this being good or bad, but
   there are good contenders already, and since they are destined to get
   improved too, we might see people go with the others instead of going
   libcurl. The reasons for taking the other paths may be due to features and
   support, but I think softer philosophic reasons like licensing and project
   leadership will play big parts too.

Let's continue having a dynamic project. We take turns when we see them. We
add things when we need them. We fix bugs when they hit us.

NUMBERS
=======

 Friends of mine know that I'm fond of gathering nonsense statistics and
numbers. Here's a bunch of my latest findings:

Number of mails I've sent during 2001 (so far) regarding curl
  1,618

Total number of mails I sent during 2001 (so far)
  5,208

Total number of mails I received during 2001 (so far)
  34,925

Number of "hits" on the curl.haxx.se web site right now on an average 4-week
period:
  120,000

Number of "hits" on the curl.haxx.se web site one year ago on an average
4-week period:

  60,000

Number of email addresses subscribed to curl mailing lists:
  474

Number of bugs summitted to the bug tracker during 2001:
  75

Average turnaround time until bugs were closed during 2001:
  9.7 days

        See you all next year!

-- 
    Daniel Stenberg -- curl groks URLs -- http://curl.haxx.se/