Hi,

On 20.05.2026 17:57, Adolf Belka wrote:
> Hi Michael,
> 
> On 20/05/2026 17:32, Michael Tremer wrote:
>> Hello Adolf,
>> 
>> Thanks for looking into this.
>> 
>> I wasn’t quite aware how outdated we are on squid, so let’s change that.
> 
> I think Matthias looked at updating squid from the 6.x to 7.x branch but felt 
> uncomfortable with how to deal with some of the changes in that new branch.

I'm watching  - and yes, I'm feeling very uncomfortable with these v7.x
changes. ;-))

But I got 'squid 7.xx' running without seen problems - currently v7.5
with Core 201. But I was in fact "very unpleased" with the various
changes which came with v7.0.1.

A lot of features were removed - Ident protocol support, cache object
protocol support, 'cachemgr.cgi' tool, just to name a few. Because of
these changes, the ‘proxy.cgi’ file should to be revised in a few
places. And this was a job I avoided until now, I just hadn't the
nerves. I took a look at the code and wasn't sure which parts should be
removed and which parts need to stay. So I didn't touch the CGI, crossed
my fingers and started 'squid 7.5'. It works.
> Maybe we can both have a try and see what happens. Check if we can we make it 
> work as expected. I will look back at the previous email chain on the 
> discussion on moving to squid-7.x

Yep. We can try this together. At the moment I'm only unsure which parts
 of 'proxy.cgi' must be removed and which have to stay. The whole thing
is currently running - I use only the basic squid functions without any
authentication. With a few changes I even got 'privoxy 4.1.0' running.

First thing I could do (e.g.) is trying to get 'squid 7.5' compiling and
running without nettle support as you wrote below. Would that help as a
first step?

Best
Matthias

>> I checked the code and there are exactly two places where nettle is being 
>> used:
>> 
>>    * The base64 encoder/decoder
>>      
>> https://git.ipfire.org/?p=thirdparty/squid.git;a=blob;f=include/base64.h;hb=5c1d937d2068e4861f206884cebb02d2958d3563#l13
>> 
>>    * Some code to compute MD5 checksums
>>      
>> https://git.ipfire.org/?p=thirdparty/squid.git;a=blob;f=include/md5.h;hb=5c1d937d2068e4861f206884cebb02d2958d3563#l13
> 
> This was the bit where the build failed as it could not find MD5_DIGEST_SIZE. 
> It could be that the base64 encoder/decoder might have been next in line.
> 
>> 
>> Both have an alternative implementation, so it is absolutely safe for us to 
>> build squid with --without-nettle. That way we won’t be held back until they 
>> have agreed on a unified API.
>> > Let me know if this helps.
> 
> I will try it and see. Everything before the squid build had no problems with 
> nettle-4.0, I just need to see if there is anything still to come in the 
> build tree. I will look at it when/if it comes.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Adolf.
> 
>> 
>> All the best,
>> -Michael
>> 
>>> On 20 May 2026, at 13:47, Adolf Belka <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> For information.
>>>
>>> A new nettle version has come out. Our old version was 3.10.2 and the new 
>>> one is 4.0
>>>
>>> Unfortunately nettle-4.0 has a new API/ABI and several packages that use 
>>> nettle have found that it won't build for them.
>>>
>>> Many of those packages have already issued updated versions that now work 
>>> with nettle-4.0
>>>
>>> That is not the case with squid. Here we have a greater problem.
>>>
>>> Currently we are on squid-6.14 and the current release is squid-7.5. 
>>> squid-6.14 fails to build with nettle-4.0 as there are changes in various 
>>> variables/parameters.
>>>
>>> squid-7.5 does not yet have any fix for the nettle API/ABI changes. I did 
>>> find some discussion on it in the Pull Requests section but there seems to 
>>> be some disagreement between various of the squid contributors which seems 
>>> to be blocking anything being accepted. It is also not clear if that pull 
>>> request would fix the error that I found in my build with squid-6.14
>>>
>>> squid has not been updated to the 7.x branch in IPFire because there were a 
>>> lot of significant changes in it which would require some re-write of our 
>>> web proxy code.
>>>
>>> It is probably worth noting that squid-6.14 stopped getting any security 
>>> support in July 2025.
>>>
>>> There also seems to be questions about squid-8.x and if it will have even 
>>> more major changes to options.
>>>
>>> squid typically is having a two year cycle on their major branch changes 
>>> and so the expectation is that squid-7.x will go EOL somewhere around July 
>>> 2027 with squid-8.x having beta status in Feb 2027 and stable declaration 
>>> in July 2027 when 7.x is EOL'd
>>>
>>> I will try and see if any other packages we run have any linkage to nettle.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Adolf.
>>>
>> 
> 
> 


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