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posted by janrinok on Wednesday April 23 2014, @12:36PM   Printer-friendly
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."

 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:44PM (#34914)

    Some highlights:

    realloc has handled NULL since I had a mullet and parachute pants.

    If modern society can get past selling daughters for cows, surely we can
    decide to write modern C code in an "application" that is probably 3 lines
    of shell/python/cgi away from talking to the internet in a lot of
    places...

    - Why do we hide from the OpenSSL police, dad?
    - Because they're not like us, son. They use macros to wrap stdio
      routines, for an undocumented (OPENSSL_USE_APPLINK) use case.

    I wonder if their moto is "If you can't solve a problem, at least try to do it badly".

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