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from the introducing-more-bugs-than-it-cures? dept.
Ars Technica has a story about the effort of some OpenBSD developers to clean up the OpenSSL codebase as part of a fork they've named LibreSSL. From the article:
The decision to fork OpenSSL is bound to be controversial given that OpenSSL powers hundreds of thousands of Web servers. When asked why he wanted to start over instead of helping to make OpenSSL better, de Raadt said the existing code is too much of a mess. "Our group removed half of the OpenSSL source tree in a week. It was discarded leftovers," de Raadt told Ars in an e-mail. "The Open Source model depends [on] people being able to read the code. It depends on clarity. That is not a clear code base, because their community does not appear to care about clarity. Obviously, when such cruft builds up, there is a cultural gap. I did not make this decision... in our larger development group, it made itself."
When asked what he meant by OpenSSL containing "discarded leftovers," de Raadt said there were "Thousands of lines of VMS support. Thousands of lines of ancient WIN32 support. Nowadays, Windows has POSIX-like APIs and does not need something special for sockets. Thousands of lines of FIPS support, which downgrade ciphers almost automatically." There were also "thousands of lines of APIs that the OpenSSL group intended to deprecate 12 years or so ago and [are] still left alone."
De Raadt told ZDNet that his team has removed 90,000 lines of C code. "Even after all those changes, the codebase is still API compatible," he said. "Our entire ports tree (8,700 applications) continue to compile and work after all these changes."
(Score: 5, Funny) by VLM on Wednesday April 23 2014, @12:39PM
The summary missed the funniest part of the story, quoted below:
"LibreSSL has a bare bones website that is intentionally unappealing... "This page scientifically designed to annoy web hipsters," the site says. "Donate now to stop the Comic Sans and Blink Tags.""
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23 2014, @12:50PM
The Comic Sans I can deal with...but OMG the blinking, please stop. Every time that text blinks, a kitten dies!!!!!1111eleventyone
(Score: 2) by xlefay on Wednesday April 23 2014, @12:51PM
Quickly, donate!
(Score: 1) by petecox on Wednesday April 23 2014, @01:35PM
What browser are you using?
Firefox killed off blink some time ago...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:06PM
Really? I'm using Firefox 28 and it's blinking for me
(Score: 4, Informative) by forsythe on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:23PM
If you examine the CSS, part of the style is
So it should blink on a browser that doesn't implement <blink> to actually blink.
(Score: 1) by francois.barbier on Wednesday April 23 2014, @08:29PM
You can actually make any text blink in most browsers:
(Score: 3, Funny) by tangomargarine on Wednesday April 23 2014, @04:09PM
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/163291-firefo x-23-finally-kills-the-blink-tag-removes-ability-t o-turn-off-javascript-introduces-new-logo [extremetech.com]
Symptomatic of Firefox these days, I wouldn't consider any of those 3 features to be changes I desire.
Interestingly, <marquee> still works.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Wednesday April 23 2014, @06:30PM
OMG. If that were so, I would bookmark the page and leave it in the foreground.
(Score: 2) by Horse With Stripes on Wednesday April 23 2014, @12:52PM
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:44PM
Some highlights:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23 2014, @05:13PM
"section class="we-love-web-devs-especially-those-that-writ e-blink-tags-for-us""
Everyone should read html source, there are many sites with awesome little messages.