Re: Linking coreutils against OpenSSL
On Thu, 9 Nov 2023 at 22:54, Benjamin Barenblat <bbaren@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Dear Debian folks,
>
> coreutils can link against OpenSSL, yielding a substantial speed boost
> in sha256sum etc. For many years, this was inadvisable due to license
> conflicts. However, as of bookworm, coreutils requires GPL-3+ and
> OpenSSL is Apache-2.0, so I believe all license compatibility questions
> have been resolved.
>
> What would you think about having coreutils Depend on libssl3? This
> would make the libssl3 package essential, which is potentially
> undesirable, but it also has the potential for serious user time savings
> (on recent Intel CPUs, OpenSSL’s SHA-256 is over five times faster than
> coreutils’ internal implementation).
This sounds great. systemd also uses OpenSSL for various things, so
libssl3 is pretty much a given on any bootable installation anyway
already.
> Alternatively, what would you think about making sha256sum etc.
> divertible and providing implementations both with and without the
> OpenSSL dependency?
Please, no, no more diversion/alternatives/shenanigans, it's just huge
and convoluted complications for no real gain.
Reply to: