Re: Linking coreutils against OpenSSL

[Ansgar <ansgar@43-1.org>]

On Fri, 2023-11-10 at 08:48 -0500, Michael Stone wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 10, 2023 at 10:38:13AM +0000, Luca Boccassi wrote:
> > Per-architecture dependencies are possible though, so maybe starting
> > to add the libssl dependency only on amd64 is a good starting point,
> > and then users of other architectures can request to be added too if
> > it is beneficial for them.
> 
> I haven't seen any objections to the basic idea, so I'm starting here: 
> coreutils 9.4-2 will link to libcrypto if there's a gpl-compatible 
> version available at build time, but I've added the build-dependency as 
> linux-amd64 only for now. That should make it fairly straightforward for 
> people to control the linking on other architectures by controlling 
> their build environment. Going forward, depending on feedback, I can 
> roll this back, expand the build-dep, and/or make the configure option 
> also depend on the arch.

Please avoid producing different results depending on the build
environment. That just results in non-reproducible issues in unclean
environments (suddenly different dependencies, different features,
...).

Please consider to just use openssl everywhere or also explicitly
disable/enable build options per arch. (Personally I would in this case
probably just enable openssl everywhere and recommend people to improve
openssl in case it is slower than the built-in implementation; openssl
is probably use widely enough to warrant that.)

Ansgar