| OpenSSL STATUS Last modified at | |
| ______________ $Date: 1999/01/02 16:28:51 $ | |
| DEVELOPMENT STATE | |
| o OpenSSL 0.9.2: Under development. | |
| o OpenSSL 0.9.1c: Released on December 23th, 1998 | |
| RELEASE SHOWSTOPPERS | |
| AVAILABLE PATCHES | |
| IN PROGRESS | |
| o Ben is folding in his patches | |
| NEEDS PATCH | |
| OPEN ISSUES | |
| o The Makefile hierarchy and build mechanism is still not a round thing: | |
| 1. The config vs. Configure scripts | |
| It's the same nasty situation as for Apache with APACI vs. | |
| src/Configure. It confuses. | |
| Suggestion: Merge Configure and config into a single configure | |
| script with a Autoconf style interface ;-) and remove | |
| Configure and config. Or even let us use GNU Autoconf | |
| itself. Then we can avoid a lot of those platform checks | |
| which are currently in Configure. | |
| 2. The massive symlinking of Makefile.ssl -> Makefile: | |
| First the `make -f Makefile.ssl links' command is nasty, second the | |
| whole process is slow and third it seems to be done without real | |
| need. And forth, the dependecies are currently missing. And fifth, | |
| it's complicated to always go to the top-level in order to get the | |
| local variables overriden. | |
| Suggestion: Rename Makefile.ssl to Makefile.in, add | |
| dependencies to Makefile.in and change the build process | |
| to _generate_ Makefile out of Makefile.in by | |
| substituting variables like CC, etc. This solves the | |
| above problems. | |
| 3. The xxx.org -> xxx.h generation: | |
| It's not obvious for which file xxx.org is the source. | |
| Suggestion: Rename xxx.org to xxx.h.in (Autoconf style), this way | |
| one sees that xxx.h.in is the input for xxx.h | |
| o The installation under "make install" produces a very | |
| installation layout: $prefix/certs and $prefix/private dirs. That's | |
| not nice. Ralf suggests to move the two certs and private dirs either | |
| to $prefix/etc/, $prefix/lib/ or $prefix/share. Alternatively | |
| we could also not install the certs at all. | |
| Status: Ralf +1 for both not installing the certs at all and | |
| moving it to $prefix/etc/. +0 for $prefix/lib/ | |
| and $prefix/share. | |
| Paul: why is it not nice? | |
| Ralf: because it messes up the install dir when | |
| $prefix is not a dedicated area like /usr/local/ssl. | |
| When we move them to a standard subdir like | |
| etc/ lib/ or share/ we don't mess up things | |
| when $prefix is /usr or /usr/local, etc. | |
| Additionally it makes package vendors life | |
| easier.... | |
| o Support for Shared Libraries has to be added at least | |
| for the major Unix platforms. The details we can rip from the stuff | |
| Ralf has done for the Apache src/Configure script. Ben wants the | |
| solution to be really simple. | |
| Status: Ralf will look how we can easily incorporate the | |
| compiler PIC and linker DSO flags from Apache | |
| into the OpenSSL Configure script. | |
| o The perl/ stuff needs a major overhaul. Currently it's | |
| totally obsolete. Either we clean it up and enhance it to be up-to-date | |
| with the C code or we also could replace it with the really nice | |
| Net::SSLeay package we can find under | |
| http://www.neuronio.pt/SSLeay.pm.html. Ralf uses this package for a | |
| longer time and it works fine and is a nice Perl module. Best would be | |
| to convince the author to work for the OpenSSL project and create a | |
| Net::OpenSSL or Crypt::OpenSSL package out of it and maintains it for | |
| us. | |
| Status: Ralf thinks we should both contact the author of Net::SSLeay | |
| and look how much effort it is to bring Eric's perl/ stuff up | |
| to date. | |
| Paul +1 | |
| o Ralf has ported Stephen's pkcs12 program to OpenSSL (the | |
| ASN.1 stuff Eric recently changed :-( ), but needs some help from | |
| Stephen at two source locations. Stephen itself also has ported his | |
| internal pkcs12 0.53 version to OpenSSL, but thinks we still shouldn't | |
| incorporate it into OpenSSL because it needs more cleanups. Ralf still | |
| thinks pkcs12 should be incorporated better now than later because it's | |
| nasty to not have it in the core - one always has to install it | |
| manually and a lot of people use it. So, should we incorporate it? | |
| BTW, we have to be carefully because of the pkcs12 license: There are | |
| some things which don't match the OpenSSL license, so Stephen has to | |
| change it for us when we want to incorporate the code. | |
| Status: Ralf +1, Stephen -0 |