Do I need to maintain platform specific include files for using OpenSSL3.0.9

[Michael Wojcik]

> From: openssl-users <openssl-users-bounces at openssl.org> On Behalf Of Tathagata Chakraborty
> Sent: Wednesday, 21 June, 2023 04:53

> Do I need to build openssl in all OS platforms and use the set of include files from each platform build

Yes.

In some cases you may get away with using the headers built for a different platform / set of configuration options, but in many cases you won't, and sometimes the bugs are subtle.

With OpenSSL 1.0.2 (I think) we had an obscure runtime failure on AIX because a build process error was causing it to use headers from a different platform. Everything compiled and ran – we just got incorrect results from some cryptography operation. I don't recall the details but it was definitely not a good situation, since it was only caught by having fairly broad test suites.

Of course some of the headers are not generated by the build and could be shared, but that's a fragile approach, and not worth the effort of figuring out which ones need to be platform-specific. Disk space is cheap.

So be sure to use the headers that were built for the same platform and configuration as the libraries were. And run the OpenSSL tests as part of your build process.

-- 
Michael Wojcik