openssl vs. libressl

[Brandon Allbery]

On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 8:31 PM, René J.V. <rjvbertin at gmail.com> wrote:

> First quick tests (downloading a couple of release tarballs from github,
> with /opt/local/bin/curl) suggests that it works. Which doesn't really
> surprise me too much: both libraries are written in C. As long as dependent
> software sticks to public APIs (and those APIs are indeed compatible), the
> binary libraries should be compatible too, regardless of how different they
> are "behind the scenes".


And assuming said APIs do not expose internal details in
programmer-callable macros, have the caller allocate structures whose size
might change, etc. See the Gentoo dev link given previously. (The macros
one is a lovely example of how an API may be the same but the ABI quite
different. ncurses 6 has a lot of this going on vs. ncurses 5, because the
public curses API has quite a few things that are implemented as macros;
the ncurses 6 documentation specifically warns that the API is as close as
possible to that of ncurses 5, but the ABI quite incompatible.)

Very old versions of KDE also used macros this way, and they learned the
hard way about this API/ABI compatibility break.

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
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