[openssl-dev] Under-utilization of "const" in prototyping?

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On 12/04/2014 07:34 PM, Philip Prindeville wrote:
> I'll make a deal: if you can suggest a way to carve up the task so that
> it *can* be done incrementally, I'll see what I can do.

My experience with trying to constify larger, more-complex codebases is
that it is often *very* difficult to do incrementally.

If you have a way to do static analysis to find leaf functions, that
might be a way to get some smaller pieces that you can constify, but i
don't know the common static analysis tools well enough to be able to
point you to such a thing.

> For kicks and giggles, I tried to change crypto/asn1/asn1.h and the
> functions it contains, and it quickly rippled out into other modules
> (like RSA, etc).

I think sometimes just diving in like this is worth doing.  A successful
constifying rampage across the OpenSSL codebase would be real boon to
the project (of course it would probably end up modifying some public
interfaces, so it would need to take effect publicly during an API change).

	--dkg

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