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**Jerod Santo:** Somewhere around there; maybe you take a vacation -- you know, hopefully you take a vacation... |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, sometimes I take vacations, of course, but I've also done periods with more intense development. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's just the average. 13,260 hours, just based on the estimation. |
**Jerod Santo:** So what keeps you going? There's gotta be something. We struggle with burnout, and we talk about burnout with many people, especially when their project gets to become more successful than they ever planned, and it just becomes too much... How do you sustain it for 17 years? What drives that? |
**Daniel Stenberg:** I actually have a hard time to really explain that... I know a lot of people who get into the projects and work on them for a while and then drop out after a while... And of course, I have a lot of other projects that I've worked on and I haven't kept going on those. So I think that has just become... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's your legacy. |
**Daniel Stenberg:** I really enjoy it. |
**Jerod Santo:** Do you still enjoy it today like you did back when it was first getting going? |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Oh yeah, I do. I enjoy working on it every day. And actually, without mentioning details, now for example, just today I've finished a conversation, so I'm gonna do full-time curl development now for probably a couple of months going forward... |
**Jerod Santo:** Really? |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, and I'm just thrilled about that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's interesting. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, congrats on that. That's awesome. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So what does full-time curl look like? What's on your list of things to get done, or to do? Is it a list of bugs that have been driving you crazy, or is it new features? What is it? |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Right now it's mostly about getting all my remaining HTTP/2 stuff done for curl. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Nice. |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Since HTTP/2 is new and hot and everything, I've implemented HTTP/2 support in curl, and it's there, but it's not completed and it's not really there API-wise and libcurl-wise the way I want it to be, and the way I think a lot of users want it to be. |
**Jerod Santo:** Man, just thinking about maintaining a project of this size... Looking at contributors - I'm letting GitHub crunch their data - it looks like you have 481,000 lines added, 302,000 lines removed. What's the overall size of the codebase now, roughly? |
**Daniel Stenberg:** It's not that terribly big. I think we're around 200k lines of code in the actual project, and there's a lot of tests and infrastructure around it, but the code in the actual tool and the library - it isn't that big a project. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[24:17\] So it doesn't feel unwieldy. It seems like projects, as they grow, especially with how many protocols you support - over the years, it seems like things tend to get unwieldy. Maybe the big rewrite starts becoming a thought... Have you ever had those kind of issues, where you hit a wall and th... |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Well, of course, there have been some obstacles and points in time when I kind of ripped out a lot of junk and redone things internally, but I would say that I've never considered to change language. And of course, that's me being old and grumpy and coding C... But I also think that a big explanati... |
And when it comes to things like architectural decisions and how I made things work internally - we've actually been able to change that to a pretty large degree internally over the years, without any significant rewrites, just ordinary development and just changing things over time. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's go a little meta here real quick, because I'm noticing that you actually have a link to a changelog on the site for curl... What has it been like, I guess, maintaining such a drastically long changelog? It would take me 25-30 scrolls to scroll this entire changelog... And I guess is this manua... |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Well, I'd say that is part of what -- you sometimes forget what maintaining a project is... That is everything that isn't code, like the website, and just putting things up and maintaining the changelog, or maintaining things like security advisories, or whatever... Just making sure that the docume... |
In terms of the specifics around the changelog, I do that -- not manually; I have a lot of scripts. But I basically add the chunk for every new release at the time of every new release. |
I did a release this Wednesday, and then I added the 7.42.0 details, and I inserted it this Wednesday. I'm gonna do another release this coming Wednesday, and then I'm gonna add the blurb for the next release. It's all about that. And then I have a lot of scripts gathering that information and webifying it. |
**Jerod Santo:** You also have a pretty epic man page... \[laughter\] |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Yes, exactly. It's actually kind of insane. That's one of our problems, that we've added so much features and so much things that it gets hard to find your way around. It's hard to write documentation when you have so much functionality. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[28:05\] What about modularizing, taking libcurl and breaking it up into smaller bits, that maybe are protocol-specific, or some other arrangement that makes sense, and then having a wrapper library that kind of pulls those all in. Have you considered architectural things like that? |
**Daniel Stenberg:** I have, but I've never really found the motivation to really go there. I've tried to ask my audience or users what they think and what they want from the library in terms of protocols and everything, and it turns out that a lot of users use a lot of protocols. So it's not only that we're supporting... |
**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. This makes me think of another question, which is "How do you talk to your users?" You have (I think you even said) a billion users, and probably you don't even know all your users, especially when it's embedded in systems, and whatnot... What's your tools and your communication channel between... |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, it's really crappy... \[laughter\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "It's not good at all..." |
**Jerod Santo:** Tell us how you really feel... \[laughter\] |
**Daniel Stenberg:** No, but the usual kind of open source problem - I release source code, and then it goes out in the world, but it gets to code, and builds it, and builds the product and runs with it. And I have no idea who will do it and what they'll do with it, and if they're happy or not. Maybe they'll never come... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So it's kind of the squeaky wheel gets the oil type of a thing. |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah. And of course, that's a subset of the users, and probably a particular subset that aren't at all representative of the kind of \[unintelligible 00:31:00.25\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's the hard part... It's like, is this request serving my users, or just this one particular loud user? |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Exactly, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's a thing you've gotta ask yourself. |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah. I just have to always try to sense that somehow, and get a feel for "Is this a good idea for the project, or just for this user?" or whatever. But often, it all comes down to who's willing to do the work anyway. So if there's someone who brings code and thinks it's a good idea and it seems to... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's take a pause here. We'll do a quick sponsored break. When we come back, considering the fact that you've been in the game so long with this project, we've gotta imagine that you've been through several different version control systems, so we wanna talk deeply about your love/hate for version ... |
**Break:** \[32:10\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Alright Daniel, we're back. Like I said before the break, 17 years at this, you must have been through pretty much every one, and now you're on GitHub, so you're obviously using Git now... And you been using Git for a while; I think about a year now... Is that right, since you've been on GitHub? |
**Daniel Stenberg:** No, it's like four years, or three years, or whatever. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh. Where have I been at...? Four years on GitHub? |
**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, I think so. I don't remember exactly. We've been through a couple of different version control systems, and we've actually switched to Git pretty late, actually... We stayed with CVS for forever... But that also goes back to the fact that we're a small project and we're doing things very simp... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Daniel Stenberg:** So we don't have a lot of requirements on the version control system either. It worked pretty good with CVS, too. I mean, Git is way better and way more fancy, and I really like it; so it's not that I regret it, but that's also an explanation why we couldn't stick with the old for so long. |
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