Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/5] http: correct curl version check for CURLOPT_PINNEDPUBLICKEY

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2021 21:41:41 +0200

On Fri, Sep 10 2021, Daniel Stenberg wrote:

> On Fri, 10 Sep 2021, Jeff King wrote:
>
>>> 1. protip: curl.git git tags are rather useless, since (at least for old
>>>    versions) the embedded version number is bumped sometime *after* the
>>>    release).
>
> (double-level quote since I miseed the original email saying this)
>
> This is simply not true and it makes me really curious why you would
> think this.
>
> We (in the curl project) tag the git repository exactly at the point
> we generate the release from. The release is however the generated
> tarball, and the tag is the moment in the git history where the
> release was done. That's why the release number at the time of the tag
> will always say "blabla-DEV" something.
>
> I know this, becasue I've done every single curl release personally,
> since the dawn of time. Of course we've only used git since about 2010
> but I can't remember that we ever did it differently.
>
> The exact step-by-step to do a release is also documented since years back:
>   https://curl.se/dev/release-procedure.html

I take that back, sorry.

It turns out to just have been a stupid mistake of mine. I don't know
where exactly but somewhere in the checking out of verions, building &
installing them I had a LIBCURL_VERSION_NUM that didn't match. But
looking back at the tarballs I unpacked (which I didn't remove in the
interim) it does match.

So it was just a mistake of mine, sorry to soil curl's good reputation
on a public ML, my bad.

For what it's worth I'm rather prejudiced to the knee-jerk reaction of
just giving up on source control pretty early on for this sort of thing.
I.e. seeing what state some some ancient software version from 10-15-20
years back was in.

It is really common for the two to mismatch (e.g. because there was
never a version for that release, the maintainer grabbed some version,
did "make dist", adjusted files manually etc.). But apparently curl was
rather early on bandwagon of good SCM practices.