Re: roken merge

[Assar Westerlund <assar@sics.se>]

Brian May <bmay@csse.monash.edu.au> writes:
> I hope that one day in the future (and some of this is already be the
> long term plan), that the "shared" shared libraries (eg com_err, des,
> editline, roken, sl?, otp?) between the following applications:
> 
> - heimdal
> - kerberos4kth
> - MIT kerberos
> - arla
> + any others that I might have missed, or future applications
> that haven't been written yet.

I cannot speak for the MIT Kerberos maintainers, but for krb4/heimdal
and arla the goal is to have the maximum amount of shared code, and of
course to encourage other people to make use of the code.

> can be standardised (perhaps with the help of openssl) and distributed
> separately.

openssl would in that case just be the replacement for libdes.  Up
until know it was a problem in that openssl did not include md4 but
that has been corrected in the current openssl.

> It would also make source code to each of this applications smaller
> and easier to manage. eg consider how much simpler Heimdal's configure
> script would be if it didn't have to process lib/roken/roken.h.in, but
> could instead rely on an installed copy of roken.h, with the constants
> already defined.

Yes, but you create another release problem, keeping track what
versions of libroken (for instance) are required for what other
packages.  If you end up with a different libroken installed for every
package, you kind of miss the point of having it shared.

/assar