curl/docs/DEPRECATE.md
Daniel Stenberg 267668308b
configure: deprecate builds with small curl_off_t
If curl_off_t turns out to be smaller than 8 bytes,
--with-n64-deprecated needs to be used to allow the build to
continue. This is to highlight the fact that support for such builds is
going away next year.

Also mentioned in DEPRECATED.md

Closes #9605
2022-09-28 08:19:06 +02:00

1.9 KiB

Items to be removed from future curl releases

If any of these deprecated features is a cause for concern for you, please email the curl-library mailing list as soon as possible and explain to us why this is a problem for you and how your use case cannot be satisfied properly using a workaround.

Support for systems without 64 bit data types

curl will require support for a 64 bit data type (like long long or an alternative) to build. These days, few systems are used where no such type is around so the cost of maintaining this support is increasingly unnecessary to spent effort and time on, while supporting 32 bit values for some of those fields is complicated and hard to test.

Adding this requirement will make the code simpler, easier to maintain and the test coverage better. It is a low price too, since virtually no users are still building curl on such systems.

long long was not a standard type until C99, but has been supported by C89 compilers since the 1990s.

Starting in 8.0.0 (March 2023), the plan is to drop support.

Starting in 7.86.0, building curl with configure requires the additional flag --with-n64-deprecated if the curl_off_t type on your system is smaller than 8 bytes, in an attempt to highlight these plans to affected users.

NSS

We remove support for building curl with the NSS TLS library in August 2023.

  • There are few users left who use curl+NSS
  • NSS has few users outside of curl as well (primarily Firefox)
  • NSS is harder than ever to find documentation for
  • NSS was always "best" used with Red Hat Linux when they provided additional features on top of the regular NSS that is not shipped by the vanilla library

Starting in 7.82.0, building curl to use NSS configure requires the additional flag --with-nss-deprecated in an attempt to highlight these plans.

past removals

  • Pipelining
  • axTLS
  • PolarSSL
  • NPN