Legacy provider

Viktor Dukhovni openssl-users at dukhovni.org
Wed Jan 15 21:41:05 UTC 2020


My abstain vote was a carefully considered neutral stance backed
by many paragraphs of rationale.

The gist of which is that given that the decision to load or not
the provider is in the configuration file, the party ultimately
making the decision is whoever packages the software, not the
OpenSSL project.  OS distributions and users will make their own
choices, as they build packages and deploy systems.

Our "default" choice is just a "suggestion".  So the real change
is providing a mechanism to make the choice, the specific choice
we default to is IMHO not that important, and signalling that
the legacy algorithms are best left disabled when possible is
a reasonable outcome.  But, on the other hand we also want to
largely remain compatible with 3.0, and make compile and deploy
easy.  So there is some reason to take the compatible default.

I had the advantage of voting last, knowing that my abstain would
allow the vote to pass...

> On Jan 15, 2020, at 3:07 PM, Benjamin Kaduk <kaduk at mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> It's good to have a decision here, but I'm kind of worried about the four
> abstains -- it's easy for me to leap to a conclusion that the individuals
> in question just didn't want to to spend the time to come to a considered
> position, even though this issue has substantial potential impact for our
> userbase.  I'm trying to not make faulty assumptions, so some greater
> clarity on the circumstances would be helpful, if possible.

-- 
	Viktor.



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