[openssl-project] platforms

[Richard Levitte]

In message <20180109202908.GA6587 at roeckx.be> on Tue, 9 Jan 2018 21:29:09 +0100, Kurt Roeckx <kurt at roeckx.be> said:

kurt> In Debian I use the attached patch. It's an easy way for me to
kurt> override the defaults and be follow the Debian policy. Is that
kurt> something that would fall under the community provided?

So while I can be seen as dismissive of this idea, it does prompt an
interesting discussion that we've had before and that never really got
concluded.  The central question is, what is this "config target" we
keep talking about and not defining very strictly?

One idea is that a config target is something that determines the
unique characteristics of a given combination of operating system,
CPU, toolchain (roughly speaking and top of my head, I may be missing
some axis).  We might possibly have to make a difference between some
versions along one or more of those axes, and in some cases, it might
be wiser to talk about kernels rather than operating systems.  That's
roughly it...  or should be, methinks.

So I'm looking at Debian -- in fact, that's what I'm running on my
laptop and am doing my daily work on -- and thinking that from a
developer's point of view and from the point of view of an OpenSSL
user, that's just another Linux.  And we already have Linux-specific
targets that, as far as I can tell, are working as they should.
That's basically what makes me wonder why we should have config
targets that are specific to *one* Linux distro?

(mind you, if some of those targets are config targets that are
missing entirely in our 'linux-*' range, perhaps the latter need an
update?  If that's the intent, then I do agree that they could, and
possibly should be integrated, after a rename to 'linux-{whatever}')

Cheers,
Richard

-- 
Richard Levitte         levitte at openssl.org
OpenSSL Project         http://www.openssl.org/~levitte/