libmd (was Re: Having a single, good arc4random in Debian)

[Guillem Jover]

Hi!

On Tue, 2016-01-19 at 01:18:28 +0100, Guillem Jover wrote:
> [ Just posting to debian and fdo mailing lists, but this might be of
>   interest to other distros, please feel free to forward. ]

This still applies.

> On Mon, 2016-01-18 at 18:25:36 +0100, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> > The same issue was discussed recently for the MD5 functions.
> > The first step is to create a lintian test for packages which use an 
> > internal copy of these functions.
> 
> This is something I've been a bit conflicted with for a while, and I'd
> probably appreciate some input, particularly from potential users.
> 
> In comparison with the BSDs, GNU/Linux does not have basic message digest
> functions available from the base system, and the BSD md functions end
> up being embedded in most code, because they are pretty small, and it's
> better than relying on one of the many libraries that might ship those in
> some form, it's also a guaranteed way to have these present.

> What I've been undecided on has been whether to add those to libbsd
> (which already has MD5 functions since its inception), because that's
> a compatibility library I can see some upstreams not willing to use, or
> releasing libmd [M], which matches what some BSDs actually provide, so
> some upstream already check for its presence, and it's a clean and
> targetted API.

> I'd probably prefer libmd as an independent library, because merging
> it into, say, libbsd is trivial, but taking out the symbols implies a
> SOVERSION bump, which I'd rather avoid.
>
> Also I think it would be nice to be able to have something like libmd
> in the base system, so that anything can use that w/o needing to embed
> the code, nor having to pull in bigger or less "standard" APIs there.

After the overwhelming silent support, I saw no other option than to
go ahead with releasing libmd. :)

  <https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/ftp-release/2016-February/000700.html>
  <https://ftp-master.debian.org/new/libmd_0.0.0-1.html>

Thanks,
Guillem