On Mon, 2020-12-28 at 09:56 +0100, Michał Górny wrote: > Hello, developers and Gentoo LibreSSL team. > > TL;DR: is there really a point in continuing the never-ending always- > regressing struggle towards supporting LibreSSL in Gentoo? > > > I would like to discuss the possibility of discontinuing LibreSSL > support in Gentoo in favor of sticking with OpenSSL. Similarly how we > ended up deciding that fighting for libav was unpractical and the vast > majority of users are using ffmpeg (because they didn't really have > a choice), today it seems that LibreSSL is suffering the same fate. > > LibreSSL users, does LibreSSL today have any benefit over OpenSSL? > To be honest, I don't think so. In 2014, it might have represented > a new quality. But today, OpenSSL is alive and kicking, and LibreSSL > finds it hard to keep up. > > The vast majority of software is not tested against LibreSSL. While > patches are usually trivial and we have people that submit them, > I find many of them short-sighted. Just look at [1]. Sure, it fixes > the build today but it disabled the feature for all foreseeable > future. > How likely is it that somebody will submit another patch reenabling it > with a future LibreSSL version? > > While normally I strongly prefer submitting such patches upstream, > that > makes things even worse. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if there > were > dozens of packages today that are crippled with LibreSSL just because > somebody fixed the build in the past and never revisited the problem. > > This somewhat resembles running in circles. Packages kept being > broken > with LibreSSL because rarely anyone is using it. And rarely anyone is > using LibreSSL because the apparent benefit (or lack thereof) does not > justify the constant breakage (plus invisible regressions). > > All this considered, provided that nobody is able to find a good > reason > to use LibreSSL, I would like to propose that we stop patching > packages, discontinue support for it and last rite it. > > > [1] https://761981.bugs.gentoo.org/attachment.cgi?id=679892 >
As someone who joined the LibreSSL project back in the days, I second this. The ROI given the breakages involved and, in many cases, downstream patch carrying just doesn't seem like a positive tradeoff. The idea was noble, but let's be honest: After 6 years, there's no end in sight, and we seem to be going nowhere.
