Older blog entries for bagder (starting at number 828)

I’m with Firefox OS!

Tablet

I have received a Firefox OS tablet as part of a development program. My plan is to use this device to try out stuff I work on and see how it behaves on Firefox OS “for real” instead of just in emulators or on other systems. While Firefox OS is a product of my employer Mozilla, I personally don’t work particularly much with Firefox OS specifically. I work on networking in general for Firefox, and large chunks of the networking stack is used in both the ordinary Firefox browser like on desktops as well as in Firefox OS. I hope to polish and improve networking on Firefox OS too over time.

Firefox OS tablet

Phone

The primary development device for Firefox OS is right now apparently the Flame phone, and I have one of these too now in my possession. I took a few photos when I unpacked it and crammed them into the same image, click it for higher res:

Flame - Firefox OS phone

A brief explanation of Firefox OS

Firefox OS is an Android kernel (including drivers etc) and a bionic libc – simply the libc that Android uses. Linux-wise and slightly simplified, it runs a single application full-screen: Firefox, which then can run individual Firefox-apps that appears as apps on the phone. This means that the underlying fundamentals are shared with Android, while the layers over that are Firefox and then a world of HTML and javascript. Thus most of the network stack used for Firefox – that I work with – the http, ftp, dns, cookies and so forth is shared between Firefox for desktop and Firefox for Android and Firefox OS.

Firefox OS is made to use a small footprint to allow cheaper smartphones than Android itself can. Hence it is targeted to developing nations and continents.

Both my devices came with Firefox OS version 1.3 pre-installed.

The phone

The specs: Qualcomm Snapdragon 1.2GHZ dual-core processor, 4.5-inch 854×480 pixel screen, five-megapixel rear camera with auto-focus and flash, two-megapixel front-facing camera. Dual-SIM 3G, 8GB of onboard memory with a microSD slot, and a 1800 mAh capacity battery.

The Flame phone should be snappy enough although at times it seems to take a moment too long to populate a newly shown screen with icons etc. The screen surface is somehow not as smooth as my Nexus devices (we have the 4,5,7,10 nexuses in the house), leaving me with a constant feeling the screen isn’t cleaned.

Its dual-sim support is something that seems ideal for traveling etc to be able to use my home sim for incoming calls but use a local sim for data and outgoing calls… I’ve never had a phone featuring that before. I’ve purchased a prepaid SIM-card to use with this phone as my secondary device.

Some Good

I like the feel of the tablet. It feels like a solid and sturdy 10″ tablet, just like it should. I think the design language of Firefox OS for a newbie such as myself is pleasing and good-looking. The quad-core 1GHz thing is certainly fast enough CPU-wise to eat most of what you can throw at it.

These are really good devices to do web browsing on as the browser is a highly capable and fast browser.

Mapping: while of course there’s Google maps app, using the openstreetmap map is great on the device and Google maps in the browser is also a perfectly decent way to view maps. Using openstreetmap also of course has the added bonus that it feels great to see your own edits in your own neck of the woods!

I really appreciate that Mozilla pushes for new, more and better standardized APIs to enable all of this to get done in web applications. To me, this is one of the major benefits with Firefox OS. It benefits all of us who use the web.

Some Bad

Firefox OS feels highly US-centric (which greatly surprised me, seeing the primary markets for Firefox OS are certainly not in the US). As a Swede, I of course want my calendar to show Monday as the first day of the week. No can do. I want my digital clock to show me the time using 24 hour format (the am/pm scheme only confuses me). No can do. Tiny teeny details in the grand scheme of things, yes, but annoying. Possibly I’m just stupid and didn’t find how to switch these settings, but I did look for them on both my devices.

The actual Firefox OS system feels like a scaled-down Android where all apps are simpler and less fancy than Android. There’s a Facebook “app” for it that shows Facebook looking much crappier than it usually does in a browser or in the Android app – although on the phone it looked much better than on the tablet for some reason that I don’t understand.

I managed to get the device to sync my contacts from Google (even with my google 2-factor auth activated) but trying to sync my Facebook contacts just gave me a very strange error window in spite of repeated attempts, but again that worked on my phone!

I really miss a proper back button! Without it, we end up in this handicapped iphone-like world where each app has to provide a back button in its own UI or I have to hit the home button – which doesn’t just go back one step.

The tablet supports a gesture, pull up from the button of the screen, to get to the home screen while the phone doesn’t support that but instead has a dedicated home button which if pressed a long time shows up cards with all currently running apps. I’m not even sure how to do that latter operation on the tablet as it doesn’t’ have a home button.

The gmail web interface and experience is not very good on either of the devices.

Building Firefox OS

I’ve only just started this venture and dipped my toes in that water. All code is there in the open and you build it all with open tools. I might get back on this topic later if I get the urge to ventilate something from it… :-) I didn’t find any proper device specific setup for the tablet, but maybe I just don’t know its proper code word and I’ve only given it a quick glance so far. I’ll do my first builds and installs for the phone. Any day now!

More

My seven year old son immediately found at least one game on my dev phone (he actually found the market and downloaded it all by himself the first time he tried the device) that he really likes and now he wants to borrow this from time to time to play that game – in competition with the android phones and tablets we have here already. A pretty good sign I’d say.

Firefox OS is already a complete and competent phone operating system and app ecosystem. If you’re not coming from Android or Iphone it is a step up from everything else. If you do come from Android or Iphone I think you have to accept that this is meant for the lower end spectrum of smart-phones.

I think the smart-phone world can use more competition and Firefox OS brings exactly that.

firefox-os-bootscreen

Syndicated 2014-08-13 21:53:52 from daniel.haxx.se

I’m eight months in on my Mozilla adventure

I started working for Mozilla in January 2014. Here’s some reflections from my first time as Mozilla employee.

Working from home

I’ve worked completely from home during some short periods before in my life so I had an idea what it would be like. So far, it has been even better than I had anticipated. It suits me so well it is almost scary! No commutes. No delays due to traffic. No problems ever with over-crowded trains or buses. No time wasted going to work and home again. And I’m around when my kids get home from school and it’s easy to receive deliveries all days. I don’t think I ever want to work elsewhere again… :-)

Another effect of my work place is also that I probably have become somewhat more active on social networks and IRC. If I don’t use those means, I may spent whole days without talking to any humans.

Also, I’m the only Mozilla developer in Sweden – although we have a few more employees in Sweden.

Daniel's home office

The freedom

I have freedom at work. I control and decide a lot of what I do and I get to do a lot of what I want at work. I can work during the hours I want. As long as I deliver, my employer doesn’t mind. The freedom isn’t just about working hours but I also have a lot of control and saying about what I want to work on and what I think we as a team should work on going further.

The not counting hours

For the last 16 years I’ve been a consultant where my customers almost always have paid for my time. Paid by the hour I spent working for them. For the last 16 years I’ve counted every single hour I’ve worked and made sure to keep detailed logs and tracking of whatever I do so that I can present that to the customer and use that to send invoices. Counting hours has been tightly integrated in my work life for 16 years. No more. I don’t count my work time. I start work in the morning, I stop work in the evening. Unless I work longer, and sometimes I start later. And sometimes I work on the weekend or late at night. And I do meetings after regular “office hours” many times. But I don’t keep track – because I don’t have to and it would serve no purpose!

The big code base

I work with Firefox, in the networking team. Firefox has about 10 million lines C and C++ code alone. Add to that everything else that is other languages, glue logic, build files, tests and lots and lots of JavaScript.

It takes time to get acquainted with such a large and old code base, and lots of the architecture or traces of the original architecture are also designed almost 20 years ago in ways that not many people would still call good or preferable.

Mozilla is using Mercurial as the primary revision control tool, and I started out convinced I should too and really get to learn it. But darn it, it is really too similar to git and yet lots of words are intermixed and used as command but they don’t do the same as for git so it turns out really confusing and yeah, I felt I got handicapped a little bit too often. I’ve switched over to use the git mirror and I’m now a much happier person. A couple of months in, I’ve not once been forced to switch away from using git. Mostly thanks to fancy scripts and helpers from fellow colleagues who did this jump before me and already paved the road.

C++ and code standards

I’m a C guy (note the absence of “++”). I’ve primarily developed in C for the whole of my professional developer life – which is approaching 25 years. Firefox is a C++ fortress. I know my way around most C++ stuff but I’m not “at home” with C++ in any way just yet (I never was) so sometimes it takes me a little time and reading up to get all the C++-ishness correct. Templates, casting, different code styles, subtleties that isn’t in C and more. I’m slowly adapting but some things and habits are hard to “unlearn”…

The publicness and Bugzilla

I love working full time for an open source project. Everything I do during my work days are public knowledge. We work a lot with Bugzilla where all (well except the security sensitive ones) bugs are open and public. My comments, my reviews, my flaws and my patches can all be reviewed, ridiculed or improved by anyone out there who feels like doing it.

Development speed

There are several hundred developers involved in basically the same project and products. The commit frequency and speed in which changes are being crammed into the source repository is mind boggling. Several hundred commits daily. Many hundred and sometimes up to a thousand new bug reports are filed – daily.

yet slowness of moving some bugs forward

Moving a particular bug forward into actually getting it land and included in pending releases can be a lot of work and it can be tedious. It is a large project with lots of legacy, traditions and people with opinions on how things should be done. Getting something to change from an old behavior can take a whole lot of time and massaging and discussions until they can get through. Don’t get me wrong, it is a good thing, it just stands in direct conflict to my previous paragraph about the development speed.

In the public eye

I knew about Mozilla before I started here. I knew Firefox. Just about every person I’ve ever mentioned those two brands to have known about at least Firefox. This is different to what I’m used to. Of course hardly anyone still fully grasp what I’m actually doing on a day to day basis but I’ve long given up on even trying to explain that to family and friends. Unless they really insist.

Vitriol and expectations of high standards

I must say that being in the Mozilla camp when changes are made or announced has given me a less favorable view on the human race. Almost anything or any chance is received by a certain amount of users that are very aggressively against the change. All changes really. “If you’ll do that I’ll be forced to switch to Chrome” is a very common “threat” – as if that would A) work B) be a browser that would care more about such “conservative loonies” (you should consider that my personal term for such people)). I can only assume that the Chrome team also gets a fair share of that sort of threats in the other direction…

Still, it seems a lot of people out there and perhaps especially in the Free Software world seem to hold Mozilla to very high standards. This is both good and bad. This expectation of being very good also comes from people who aren’t even Firefox users – we must remain the bright light in a world that goes darker. In my (biased) view that tends to lead to unfair criticisms. The other browsers can do some of those changes without anyone raising an eyebrow but when Mozilla does similar for Firefox, a shitstorm breaks out. Lots of those people criticizing us for doing change NN already use browser Y that has been doing NN for a good while already…

Or maybe I’m just not seeing these things with clear enough eyes.

How does Mozilla make money?

Yeps. This is by far the most common question I’ve gotten from friends when I mention who I work for. In fact, that’s just about the only question I get from a lot of people… (possibly because after that we get into complicated questions such as what exactly do I do there?)

curl and IETF

I’m grateful that Mozilla allows me to spend part of my work time working on curl.

I’m also happy to now work for a company that allows me to attend to IETF/httpbis and related activities much better than ever I’ve had the opportunity to in the past. Previously I’ve pretty much had to spend spare time and my own money, which has limited my participation a great deal. The support from Mozilla has allowed me to attend to two meetings so far during the year, in London and in NYC and I suspect there will be more chances in the future.

Future

I only just started. I hope to grab on to more and bigger challenges and tasks as I get warmer and more into everything. I want to make a difference. See you in bugzilla.

Syndicated 2014-08-05 08:56:08 from daniel.haxx.se

libressl vs boringssl for curl

I tried to use two OpenSSL forks yesterday with curl. I built both from source first (of course, as I wanted the latest and greatest) an interesting thing in itself since both projects have modified the original build system so they’re now three different ways.

libressl 2.0.0 installed and built flawlessly with curl and I’ve pushed a change that shows LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL when doing curl -V etc.

boringssl didn’t compile from git until I had manually fixed a minor nit, and then it has no “make install” target at all so I had manually copy the libs and header files to a place suitable for curl’s configure to detect. Then the curl build failed because boringssl isn’t API compatiable with some of the really old DES stuff – code we use for NTLM. I asked Adam Langley about it and he told me that calling code using DES “needs a tweak” – but I haven’t yet walked down that road so I don’t know how much of a nuisance that actually is or isn’t.

Summary: as an openssl replacement, libressl wins this round over boringssl with 3 – 0.

Syndicated 2014-08-05 06:50:38 from daniel.haxx.se

Me in numbers, today

Number of followers on twitter: 1,302

Number of commits during the last 365 days at github: 686

Number of publicly visible open source commits counted by openhub: 36,769

Number of questions I’ve answered on stackoverflow: 403

Number of connections on LinkedIn: 608

Number of days I’ve committed something in the curl project: 2,869

Number of commits by me, merged into Mozilla Firefox: 9

Number of blog posts on daniel.haxx.se, including this: 734

Number of friends on Facebook: 150

Number of open source projects I’ve contributed to, openhub again: 35

Number of followers on Google+: 557

Number of tweets: 5,491

Number of mails sent to curl mailing lists: 21,989

TOTAL life achievement: 71,602

Syndicated 2014-07-31 09:39:54 from daniel.haxx.se

improving the curl docs, step 1

As I mentioned before, the curl documentation needs improvement. As a first step I converted the man page for curl_easy_setopt into no less than 210(!) individual man pages. One new for each option the function supports.

The man page was originally (a few days ago) almost 3000 lines, and now with them all split up we end up with a lot more text. This because the new format encourages more text per option and each page now has to detail itself more. This should also make each option much easier to google/search and to link to when we help users understand the options.

I’ve made some server-side scripts to generate html versions of them all, I generate a list of all options we have and the examples we host on the web site now have all mentions of the options linked directly to these new pages.

The curl_easy_setopt man page will then get most explanations cut out and mainly be used as an index with the options grouped into logical sections to help users find the options they want to use. I could cut out almost 2500 lines.

The new man pages add about 7500 lines of documentation (excluding the headers in each file)…

Syndicated 2014-06-21 13:49:41 from daniel.haxx.se

curl the next few years

Roadmap of things Daniel Stenberg and Steve Holme want to work on next. It is intended to serve as a guideline for others for information, feedback and possible participation.

If you agree, disagree or would like to add stuff you want to work on, please join us on the curl-library list! This “roadmap” is likely to change over time. We’ll keep the updated ROADMAP in git.

New stuff – libcurl

  1. http2 test suite

  2. http2 multiplexing/pipelining

  3. SPDY

  4. SRV records

  5. HTTPS to proxy

  6. make sure there’s an easy handle passed in to curl_formadd(), curl_formget() and curl_formfree() by adding replacement functions and deprecating the old ones to allow custom mallocs and more

  7. HTTP Digest authentication via Windows SSPI

  8. GSSAPI authentication in the email protocols

  9. add support for third-party SASL libraries such as Cyrus SASL – may need to move existing native and SSPI based authentication into vsasl folder after reworking HTTP and SASL code

  10. SASL authentication in LDAP

  11. Simplify the SMTP email interface so that programmers don’t have to construct the body of an email that contains all the headers, alternative content, images and attachments – maintain raw interface so that programmers that want to do this can

  12. Allow the email protocols to return the capabilities before authenticating. This will allow an application to decide on the best authentication mechanism

  13. Allow Windows threading model to be replaced by Win32 pthreads port

  14. Implement a dynamic buffer size to allow SFTP to use much larger buffers and possibly allow the size to be customizable by applications. Use less memory when handles are not in use?

New stuff – curl

  1. Embed a language interpreter (lua?). For that middle ground where curl isn’t enough and a libcurl binding feels “too much”. Build-time conditional of course.

  2. Simplify the SMTP command line so that the headers and multi-part content don’t have to be constructed before calling curl

Improve

  1. build for windows (considered hard by many users)

  2. curl -h output (considered overwhelming to users)

  3. we have  > 160 command line options, is there a way to redo things to simplify or improve the situation as we are likely to keep adding features/options in the future too

  4. docs (considered “bad” by users but how do we make it better?)

  5. authentication framework (consider merging HTTP and SASL authentication to give one API for protocols to call)

  6. Perform some of the clean up from the TODO document, removing old definitions and such like that are currently earmarked to be removed years ago

Remove

  1. cmake support (nobody maintains it)

  2. makefile.vc files as there is no point in maintaining two sets of Windows makefiles. Note: These are currently being used by the Windows autobuilds

Syndicated 2014-06-19 12:19:04 from daniel.haxx.se

The curl and libcurl 2014 survey

Reading through the answers to the curl project’s survey “curl and libcurl 2014″ is very interesting and educational.

After having lead and participated in this project for so long I have my own picture of what we’re good and bad at. That’s not exactly the same image I get when I read the survey responses. That’s of course the educating part and I really want to learn from this poll and see where to put in some efforts and attempt to improve. At the same time I’ve been working for a while to put together a roadmap for the project, and the survey will help guide us with that work as well.

The full generated summary of the answers can be found on the site, but I thought I do the extra effort here and try to extrapolate data, compare and try to get to the real story that lurks in the shadows.

Over the almost 10 days the poll was open, we received 194 responses. I was hoping for more participation, but on the other hand I don’t think more people would’ve given a much different view. My only concern would be that I’m not sure exactly how well we reached out.

Almost all curl users use it for HTTP and HTTPS. Sure, we also use a lot of other protocols and in fact all supported protocols did up having at least two users according to the survey, but only a single digit percentage did not mark HTTP and HTTPS as protocols they use. The least used supported protocol gopher, is used among 1.5% of the users who responded.

FTPS and SFTP are basically equally much used and they are the 4th and 5th most used protocols. HTTP, HTTPS and FTP are clearly our most popular protocols.

Only one in five users use curl on a single platform. All others use it on two or more, and one if four use it on four or more with an unexpectedly high 11% saying they use it on 5 or more platforms! That’s a pretty strong message to me that our multi-platform strategy is important.

Our users have been with us for a long time. Half of the users have been using curl for five years or more! A fifth has been with us for 8 years or more! And yet there seems to be a healthy amount of newcomers finding us as 14% is within their first year.

The above numbers combined, I’m not surprised but only happy to see that 4 out of 5 users are also involved in other open source projects. curl is just one piece in a large ecosystem and I think it is good that we all participate in several projects so that we learn and cross-pollinate where possible!

Less than half of the respondents are subscribed to a curl mailing list, and curl-library is the most popular one. This also reflects in subscriber numbers on the actual mailing lists where curl-library with its 1400+ members has almost twice as many subscribers as curl-users. One way to view this is that we are old enough, established enough and working enough so that users don’t have to subscribe to our lists to keep up. The less optimistic way to see it could be that this is because we haven’t reached out good enough or that our mailing list culture/setup isn’t welcoming enough.

Perhaps most surprising to me: that several persons got upset and reacted strongly to the question about how good we treat “female and other minorities” in the project. To me there’s no doubt that female contributors are a minority in the curl community and I want to learn if we’re doing our best to be inclusive and open to all possible contributors. Or at least how good/bad people think we are doing.

29% of the respondents have contributed patches, meaning 56 individuals. I think that tells more about the ones who took part of the survey than it measures participation level among “regular users”.

Documentation

A big revelation for me was the question where I asked people to identify the “worst parts” of the project. The image here below is the look of the summary.

It quite clearly identifies “documentation” as the area in most need of improvements.

I don’t think the amount of docs is the problem. After discussing with people I think the primary issues are:

  • Some collections of docs are just too big and hard to find in, like the curl man page and the curl_easy_setopt man pages. We need to split them up and/or rearrange somehow to help people find the info they need. Work has started on this. I’ll follow up with details later.
  • We get slightly bad “reviews” on this when people confuse the libcurl bindings’ lack of docs to be our problem. Lots of libcurl bindings are not very good documented – but they are separate projects not controlled or documented by us. I don’t know what we can do to help that situation. Suggestions are very welcome!
  • We don’t have much step-by-step tutorials on how to get started and how to knit things together. We mostly provide reference manuals. I will appreciate help with improving this!

cURL

Syndicated 2014-06-19 07:57:09 from daniel.haxx.se

Firefox and partial content

Firefox BallOne of the first bugs that fell into my lap when I started working for Mozilla not a very long time ago, was bug 237623. Anyone involved in Mozilla knows a bug in that range is fairly old (we just recently passed one million filed bugs). This particular bug was filed in March 2004 and there are (right now) 26 other bugs marked as duplicates of this. Today, the fix for this problem has landed.

The core of the problem is that when a HTTP server sends contents back to a client, it can send a header along indicating the size of the data in the response. The header is called “Content-Length:”. If the connection gets broken during transfer for whatever reason and the browser hasn’t received as much data as was initially claimed to be delivered, that’s a very good hint that something is wrong and the transfer was incomplete.

The perhaps most annoying way this could be seen is when you download a huge DVD image or something and for some reason the connection gets cut off after only a short time, way before the entire file is downloaded, but Firefox just silently accept that as the end of the transfer and think everything was fine and dandy.

What complicates the issue is the eternal problem: not everything abides to the protocol. This said, if there are frequent violators of the protocol we can’t strictly fail on each case of problem we detect but we must instead do our best to handle it anyway.

Is Content-Length a frequently violated HTTP response header?

Let’s see…

  1. Back in the HTTP 1.0 days, the Content-Length header was not very important as the connection was mostly shut down after each response anyway. Alas, clients/browsers would swiftly learn to just wait for the disconnect anyway.
  2. Back in the old days, there were cases of problems with “large files” (files larger than 2 or 4GB) which every now and then caused the Content-Length: header to turn into negative or otherwise confused values when it wrapped. That’s not really happening these days anymore.
  3. With HTTP 1.1 and its persuasive use of persistent connections it is important to get the size right, as otherwise the chain of requests get messed up and we end up with tears and sad faces
  4. In curl’s HTTP parser we’ve always been strictly abiding to this header and we’ve bailed out hard on mismatches. This is a very rare error for users to get and based on this (admittedly unscientific data) I believe that there is not a widespread use of servers sending bad Content-Length headers.
  5. It seems Chrome at least in some aspects is already much more strict about this header.

My fix for this problem takes a slightly careful approach and only enforces the strictness for HTTP 1.1 or later servers. But then as a bonus, it has grown to also signal failure if a chunked encoded transfer ends without the ending trailer or if a SPDY or http2 transfer gets prematurely stopped.

This is basically a 6-line patch at its core. The rest is fixing up old test cases, added new tests etc.

As a counter-point, Eric Lawrence apparently worked on adding stricter checks in IE9 three years ago as he wrote about in Content-Length in the Real World. They apparently subsequently added the check again in IE10 which seems to have caused some problems for them. It remains to be seen how this change affects Firefox users out in the real world. I believe it’ll be fine.

This patch also introduces the error code for a few other similar network situations when the connection is closed prematurely and we know there are outstanding data that never arrived, and I got the opportunity to improve how Firefox behaves when downloading an image and it gets an error before the complete image has been transferred. Previously (when a partial transfer wasn’t an error), it would always through away the image on an error and instead show the “image not found” picture. That really doesn’t make sense I believe, as a partial image is better than that default one – especially when a large portion of the image has been downloaded already.

Follow-up effects

Other effects of this change that possibly might be discovered and cause some new fun reports: prematurely cut off transfers of javascript or CSS will discard the entire javascript/CSS file. Previously the partial file would be used.

Of course, I doubt that these are the files that are as commonly cut off as many other file types but still on a very slow and bad connection it may still happen and the new behavior will make Firefox act as if the file wasn’t loaded at all, instead of previously when it would happily used the portions of the files that it had actually received. Partial CSS and partial javascript of course could lead to some “fun” effects of brokenness.

Syndicated 2014-06-16 08:59:09 from daniel.haxx.se

Http2 interim meeting NYC

On June 5th, around thirty people sat down around a huge table in a conference room on the 4th floor in the Google offices in New York City, with a heavy rain pouring down outside.

It was time for another IETF http2 interim meeting. The attendees were all participants in the HTTPbis work group and came from a wide variety of companies and countries. The major browser vendors were represented there, and so were operators and big service providers and some proxy people. Most of the people who have been speaking up on the mailing list over the last year or so, unfortunately with a couple of people notably absent. (And before anyone asks, yes we are a group where the majority is old males like me.)

Most people present knew many of the others already, which helped to create a friendly familiar spirit and we quickly got started on the Thursday morning working our way through the rather long lits of issues to deal with. When we had our previous interim meeting in London, I think most of us though we would’ve been further along today but recent development and discussions on the list had actually brought back a lot of issues we though we were already done with and we now reiterated a whole slew of subjects. We weren’t allowed to take photographs indoors so you won’t see any pictures of this opportunity from me here.

Google offices building logo

We did close many issues and I’ll just quickly mention some of the noteworthy ones here…

Extensions

We started out with the topic of “extensions”. Should we revert the decision from Zurich (where it was decided that we shouldn’t allow extensions in http2) or was the current state of the protocol the right one? The arguments for allowing extensions included that we’d keep getting requests for new things to add unless we have a way and that some of the recent stuff we’ve added really could’ve been done as extensions instead. An argument against it is that it makes things much simpler and reliable if we just document exactly what the protocol has and is, and removing “optional” behavior from the protocol has been one of the primary mantas along the design process.

The discussion went back and forth for a long time, and after almost three hours we had kind of a draw. Nobody was firmly against “the other” alternative but the two sides also seemed to have roughly the same amount of support. Then it was yet again time for the coin toss to guide us. Martin brought out an Australian coin and … the next protocol draft will allow extensions. Again. This also forces implementation to have to read and skip all unknown frames it receives compared to the existing situation where no unknown frames can ever occur.

BLOCKED as an extension

A rather given first candidate for an extension was the BLOCKED frame. At the time BLOCKED was added to the protocol it was explicitly added into the spec because we didn’t have extensions – and it is now being lifted out into one.

ALTSVC as an extension

What received slightly more resistance was the move to move out the ALTSVC frame as well. It was argued that the frame isn’t mandatory to support and therefore easily can be made into an extension.

Simplified padding

Another small change of the wire format since draft-12 was the removal of the high byte for padding to simplify. It reduces the amount you can pad a single frame but you can easily pad more using other means if you really have to, and there were numbers presented that said that 255 bytes were enough with HTTP 1.1 already so probably it will be enough for version 2 as well.

Schedule

There will be a new draft out really soon: draft -13. Martin, our editor of the spec, says he’ll be able to ship it in a week. That is intended to be the last draft, intended for implementation and it will then be expected to get deployed rather widely to allow us all in the industry to see how it works and be able to polish details or wordings that may still need it.

We had numerous vendors and HTTP stack implementers in the room and when we discussed schedule for when various products will be able to see daylight. If we all manage to stick to the plans. we may just have plenty of products and services that support http2 by the September/October time frame. If nothing major is found in this latest draft, we’re looking at RFC status not too far into 2015.

Meeting summary

I think we’re closing in for real now and I have good hopes for the protocol and our progress to a really wide scale deployment across the Internet. The HTTPbis group is an awesome crowd to work with and I had a great time. Our hosts took good care of us and made sure we didn’t lack any services or supplies. Extra thanks go to those of you who bought me dinners and to those who took me out to good beer places!

My http2 document

Yeah, it will now become somewhat out of date and my plan is to update it once the next draft ships. I’ll also do another http2 presentation already this week so I hope to also post an updated slide set soonish. Stay tuned!

Wireshark

My plan is to cooperate with the other Wireshark hackers and help making sure we have the next draft version supported in Wireshark really soon after its published.

curl and nghttp2

Most of the differences introduced are in the binary format so nghttp2 will need to be updated again – it is the library curl uses for the wire format of http2. The curl parts will need some adjustments, for example for Content-Encoding gzip that no longer is implicit but there should be little to do in the curl code for this draft bump.

Syndicated 2014-06-08 21:41:05 from daniel.haxx.se

Bye bye RFC 2616

In August 2007 the IETF HTTPbis work group started to make an update to the HTTP 1.1 specification RFC 2616 (from June 1999) which already was an update to RFC 2068 from 1996. I wasn’t part of the effort back then so I didn’t get to hear the back chatter or what exactly the expectations were on delivery time and time schedule, but I’m pretty sure nobody thought it would take almost seven long years for the update to reach publication status.

On June 6 2014 when RFC 7230 – RFC 7235 were released, the single 176 page document has turned into 6 documents with a total size that is now much larger, and there’s also a whole slew of additional related documents released at the same time.

2616 is deeply carved into my brain so it’ll take some time until I unlearn that, plus the fact that now we need to separate our pointers to one of those separate document instead of just one generic number for the whole thing. Source codes and documents all over now need to be carefully updated to instead refer to the new documents.

And the HTTP/2 work continues to progress at high speed. More about that in a separate blog post soon.

More details on the road from RFC2616 until today can be found in Mark Nottingham’s RFC 2616 is dead.

Syndicated 2014-06-07 13:29:23 from daniel.haxx.se

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