OSSL_PARAM thought

[Richard Levitte]

This was actually discussed in the design phase, and I think we
concluded that all arrays of this sort should be terminated rather
than counted.  I frankly cannot remember what the reasoning was behind
this, and suspect it came down to personal taste.

However, whatever way we choose should be a consistent pattern.  The
worst we can do is to have some arrays counted while having others
terminated with a special value.  That's a recipe for confusion.

(I'll note, though, that some arrays must be counted because there is
no special terminating value to be had.  As far as I can recall,
though, this is uniquely for arrays of bytes)

Cheers,
Richard

On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 03:04:21 +0200,
Dr Paul Dale wrote:
> 
> [1  <text/plain; utf-8 (quoted-printable)>]
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> We’re only starting out, so there isn’t any issue yet.  I am wondering if instead of terminating
> out OSSL_PARAM arrays with an empty element, would it make sense to pass a size and the array?
> 
> I.e. changing this code sequence (from crypto/evp/digest.c):
> 
>     params[i++] = OSSL_PARAM_construct_size_t(OSSL_DIGEST_PARAM_XOFLEN,
>                                               &size, NULL);
>     params[i++] = OSSL_PARAM_construct_end();
>     EVP_MD_CTX_set_params(ctx, params);
> 
> into:
> 
>     params[i++] = OSSL_PARAM_construct_size_t(OSSL_DIGEST_PARAM_XOFLEN,
>                                               &size, NULL);
>     EVP_MD_CTX_set_params(ctx, i, params);
> 
> For fixed arrays OSSL_NELEM would be used instead of the counter variable.
> 
> There are downsides with both approaches of course and neither jumps out as being obviously
> superior.
> 
> To me, at least, it looks like we’re going to have a lot of END’s throughout the codebase.  Saving
> one line many times seems like a win.
> 
> Pauli
> -- 
> Dr Paul Dale | Cryptographer | Network Security & Encryption 
> Phone +61 7 3031 7217
> Oracle Australia
> 
> 
-- 
Richard Levitte         levitte at openssl.org
OpenSSL Project         http://www.openssl.org/~levitte/