Only 6 days since the previous release we are again here with a curl release. It turned out 8.1.0 had some rather nasty regressions that we felt were urgent enough to warrant another round on the dance floor. So here goes curl 8.1.1. A bugfix release.

Release presentation

At 10:00 CEST (08: UTC) on May 23 2013, Daniel will live-stream a release presentation. This paragraphs will later be replaced by a link to the recording of that video.

Numbers

the 218th release
0 changes
6 days (total: 9,195)
25 bug-fixes (total: 9,031)
40 commits (total: 30,407
0 new public libcurl function (total: 91)
0 new curl_easy_setopt() option (total: 302)
0 new curl command line option (total: 251)
19 contributors, 10 new (total: 2,885)
13 authors, 6 new (total: 1,148)
0 security fixes (total: 145)

Bugfixes

Some of the highlights of this release include…

cmake: avoid list(PREPEND)

This use of a too new cmake feature snuck itself into the build in the last release which caused trouble for people using older cmake versions.

cmake: repair cross compiling

A recently added cmake check did not have the correct precautions added for cross-compiling which broke such builds.

configure: generate a script to run the compiler

The configure script has an elaborate check that verifies provided if libraries can be used at run-time. This turned out complicated when the compiler itself uses libraries that configure checks for by setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH since that path also affects the compiler!

http2: double http request parser max line length

The last word is probably not said about this logic, but capping the max request header line size to 4KB was too narrow and caused application breakages. Now the limit is at 8KB.

http2: increase stream window size to 10 MB

It turned out that even though we have a flexible HTTP/2 window concept, download performance could suffer and now we have bumped the window size again significantly.

http2: upload improvements

In particular doing uploads that are aborted prematurely by a reset when for example a 404 is returned before the entire upload was done could cause issues.

rename struct ‘http_req’ to ‘httpreq’

The development branch of FreeBSD (14) introduced a struct in one of the public headers that name-collided an internal struct libcurl uses. The bug exists in FreeBSD’s header, but we renamed ours anyway to work around the problem while the FreeBSD team fixes their end.

better error message when URLs fail to parse

Since we have a fairly elaborate identification of exactly what fails when the URL parser rejects a URL, this now helps users to better understand what curl does not like.

urlapi: allow numerical parts in the host name

The URL parser was far too strict in rejecting host names because they were “invalid IPv4” when in fact they should be treated as host names instead. Probably the worst regression added in 8.1.0. In fact, the URL parser basically cannot refuse a host name for not being a valid IPv4 since then it can get passed through to the name resolver which can then still find it in /etc/hosts etc.