curl-impersonate (lwthiker)

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What curl-impersonate (lwthiker) actually does

The original project, and still the one most search results and most older blog posts point at. It established the approach the maintained fork continues.

What curl-impersonate (lwthiker)'s maintenance signals mean

pushed_at reads 2024-07-18 — 757 days, or about 2.1 years, before the field check, which places it inside the 365-to-1095-day band the rubric calls NRND.

NRND is borrowed intact from the electronic component catalogues, where it means Not Recommended for New Designs, and it is the most useful state in this register precisely because it is not a synonym for broken. The part is still in the catalogue. You can still buy it. If you are designing something new, do not design it in. Applied here: what this project does, it very likely still does. Starting a new build on it means inheriting a maintenance gap you did not create and cannot close.

No release was captured for this entry, which this register records as unknown rather than as none. The distinction matters more than it looks: a project with no tags and a project whose tags the sweep failed to read produce the same blank cell, and printing them as the same fact would be the register asserting something it has not measured.

Where curl-impersonate (lwthiker) sits in this catalogue

curl-impersonate (lwthiker) is filed in section 07, network, tls & http fingerprint tooling, whose scope is this: The layer below JavaScript: TLS ClientHello and HTTP/2 fingerprinting, impersonating clients, and the passive tooling that reads them. An entry sits in exactly one section here. Where a project could defensibly go in two, it is placed where a reader would look for it first rather than where it fits most tidily, and that is an editorial decision rather than a measured one.

Filed beside it in the same section: uQUIC (ACTIVE), curl-impersonate (lexiforest) (ACTIVE), curl_cffi (ACTIVE). Comparing an entry against its own section-mates is more informative than comparing it against the catalogue as a whole, because everything in a section is answering roughly the same question and the differences left over are the ones that matter.

It is published under MIT, alongside the rest of the MIT entries in this register, and it sits with everything else currently marked NRND. Read those two facets together: a permissively licensed project that stopped shipping is not a safer dependency than a copyleft one that did not, and a filter on one axis alone will tell you the wrong thing.

This register records that curl-impersonate (lexiforest) supersedes curl-impersonate (lwthiker). Supersession here is declared, never inferred: it is printed only where a project or its author says so, because "newer" and "replaces" are not the same relation and treating them as one is how a list starts recommending rewrites nobody asked for.

The curl-impersonate (lwthiker) relations page sets every declared edge side by side on licence, push date, release cadence and derived state.

What to settle before you adopt curl-impersonate (lwthiker)

It has many times the visibility of the maintained fork and a much older push date, which is precisely the mismatch the NRND state exists to print. Being widely linked is not being current.