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0 pointscoldpie11y ago0 comments

I have to say, LibreSSL's snarky PR stance when it was first launched really turned me off. This stuff is hard and the code is old; being an asshole about the code quality is really inappropriate. Has their behavior matured since then?

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3 comments · 1 top-level

pakled_engineer11y ago· 2 in thread

No reason you can't look at the recent commits yourself and determine if they are 'mature' enough for you.

Alupis11y ago

They did really try to seize the moment and imho did act a bit disingenuous towards OpenSSL. They even played on the point that OpenSSL's coding style wasn't "modern" and adequate and therefore made it near impossible for people to work on[1]. Since when does having curly brackets on different lines make something impossible to read?

They also gutted more than 90,000 lines in the first month (something that would be naive to claim had absolutely no unintended side effects), and claimed the OpenSSL project would not accept a single change (sort of alluding to the OpenSSL project having some delusional desire to stay "broken"), mandating the fork[1][2].

OpenSSL was largely written by cryptographers. LibreSSL is being hacked on by OpenBSD developers.

OpenSSL's code may not be pretty, but I sure think it would have been a better use of time and efforts to have the OpenBSD developers work alongside the OpenSSL cryptographers.

[1] http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/05/libre-ssl-first-30-days

[2] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/openss...

pakled_engineer11y ago

They did, but they also were frustrated beyond sanity at what OpenSSL was doing like adding a wrapper around malloc & free and that was new code not old legacy cruft that can be excused. It also taught us all an important lesson in rage commits when Theo screwed up one of them :-P

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