On curl GitHub page there are currently two issues / pull requests opened for 
more than month which are awaiting for feedback from maintainers.

Both are dealing with problems related to building and targetting curl for 
various macOS systems.

The first one deals with crash on systems before OS X 10.9 when building curl 
on OS X 10.11 and later: https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/1330
The second one deals with failure to build curl for Mac OS X 10.6: 
https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/1333

As systems evolve and new APIs are edded and older ones get deprecated the 
project needs to decide how to deal with those situations.
Currently there's a mix of various approaches which are not necessarily 
compatible.

One approach is to take advantage of so called weak-linking: building curl with 
newer SDKs providing new functions and conditionally check for function symbols 
during runtime with fallback options on systems missing those symbols. This 
approach allows to target multiple systems when one needs/wants to bundle curl 
with the app.

Another approach is to use compile time check for presence of functions. This 
might be simpler but limits the usage of curl to specific system. It's alright 
if you expect the curl to be bundled with the system.

The latter approach has been introduced as a hot-fix for crash related to 
'clock_gettime' added in macOS 10.12 and I personally think it was wrong as it 
didn't followed the weak-linking pattern already present in the curl source 
base. The -Werror=partial-availability compiler flag turns characteristic of 
the macOS runtime into failure and prohibits wider backwards compatibility 
support. 

Are there any plans to handle those issues / pull requests and eventually sort 
those problems for good?

Palo
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