On Tue, Jun 03, 2014 at 12:20:17PM +1000, Peter Waltenberg wrote:
> (c) EBCDIC.
>
> z/OS is still alive. I'll concede that one is weird and hard to get hold
> of, but it has a lot of users still.
z/OS supports ASCII, and UTF-8, and has its own conversion routines
built into the system. So it's not clear OpenSSL needs to have any
EBCDIC built into its core code. If there are z/OS support functions
that needed to decrypt and encrypt EBCDIC, that's fine, but it
shouldn't be a tax on all the support for all other operating systems
out there.
> This ISN'T the Linux kernel. It's userspace code and longer lived and wider
> spread than Linux and pretty fundamental to security.
> Even with the 'dead' platforms crossed out, it has far more variants to
> support than Linux, and typically longer support lifetimes.
I've maintained userspace code before, including krb5 and e2fsprogs,
which works on a very large number of platforms. Yes, I never had to
support VMS, but who cares about VMS? (Hint: No one, including HP, by
2020...)
> You won't get major cleanups without purging platforms like Windows,
> OS/X, AIX, HP/UX.
OS/X, AIX, and HP/UX are all POSIX platforms, with support for BSD
sockets. Supporting them with common code and without tons and tons
of in-line #ifdef's isn't hard. In fact, e2fsprogs does compile on a
wide variety of legacy Unix platforms, without looking nearly as
horrible as OpenSSL's source code....
> Windows, I'd suggest most of the cruft there could be removed by insisting
> that it builds with gnu make/cygwin installed but using the native MS
> compiler. That's probably the biggest single cleanup possible and it's very
> much a 'live' platform.
I said Windows 3.1. Win16 and Win32 are quite different, and I'd
suggest Win16 is pretty dead. (As is MacOS pre-OSX. Again, quite
different from OSX, and equally, just as dead.)
Cheers,
- Ted
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