"Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 10:16 AM, Simon Josefsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> I just realized: doesn't Nikos' patch actually do two separate things? >> >> 1) Add the BER stuff needed to support the PKCS#12 blob >> >> 2) Optimize tree generation by using the small_value field. >> >> It is the 2) that causes the ABI break, but 1) that is needed to solve >> to the regression. >> >> Thinking about this, and speaking generally, I don't think optimizations >> are important enough to warrant an ABI break without good justification. >> Nikos, did you do any benchmarking? How much is slowed down because of >> this? > > I don't think this is a question that we would like to set to > ourselves. It leads to another questions on which optimization would > be good enough or which addition is good enough to justify the break. > > The real question would be whether we want the internal structures > published on the public API. I don't think we want this. It leads to > us being handicap (like we are now) to apply any optimization/addition > to the internal works of the library. Thus for me it is a good thing > to move them away as soon as we can to allow further development on > libtasn1. > > The other question is whether someone would like to split this patch > and apply the fix for the another compatible stable release to be > made, or just for debian version to apply it. I am not interested in > doing it, but I wouldn't object either. It is a good thing to do. > >> I'm beginning to feel that we should remove the small_value part of this >> patch, to retain ABI compatibility. > > No I am strongly against such a move. We would have to answer again > this question on the next serious change. By insisting on being > backwards compatible (without a serious reason) we will prevent any > further development on this library.
I agree, my proposal was to just remove the patch temporarily, but I wasn't clear on that. Thus I propose this plan which as far as I can tell seems OK with everyone: Release v1.6 now to fix the PKCS#12/BER problem but does not contain the optimized code, and is thus fully API and ABI backwards compatible. Apply the small_values patch on master, and prepare a v2.0 release. I'll wait 2-3 weeks to see if there are major problems with v1.6 (quite a lot of things have changed compared to v1.5) and then release it. /Simon -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
