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Sven -
Fabio suggested that I contact you for help with packaging the Numerix and
Cryptokit OCaml libraries. (He and Peter are packaging the SKS OpenPGP
keyserver, which uses these libraries, and I wound up packaging the libraries
in the course of getting an SKS instance up.) I have attached the e-mail I
sent to Xavier Leroy (the Cryptokit upstream) offering him my changes to
Cryptokit to replace its use of the non-free Nat bignum library with Numerix.
Preliminary numerix and cryptokit source packages are on http://
www-static.sane.net/. I originally cribbed debian/rules, etc. from extlib,
but am now rewriting them based on your pcre-ocaml source package. (It seems
best to use ocaml-findlibs, and hopefully the weirdness I am having with
bytecode compilation of the ported cryptokit will go away.) Up until a
couple of days ago I had never used OCaml, so I could definitely use
packaging pointers.
IANADD, so I will also need an upload sponsor if these packages are to go into
the archive. Peter and Fabio have both expressed willingness, but Fabio
thought it would be good to have a sponsor who uses OCaml. I would
appreciate it very much if you would consider sponsoring. (My changes to
Cryptokit will obviously need some review before they are uploaded; the
upstream cryptokit can't go into main because it depends on non-free parts
that have been removed from ocaml, and it would be nice if cryptokit and sks
made it into sarge main.)
Thanks in advance,
- Michael
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M. Leroy -
I have been experimenting recently with the SKS OpenPGP keyserver, which uses
both Cryptokit and the Numerix bignum library. In light of recent licensing
issues with the Nat bignum library bundled into the OCaml distribution, I
decided to port Cryptokit's implementation of RSA and Diffie-Hellman
algorithms to Numerix. Feel free to merge the revised version back into your
package. It may currently be found at http://www-static.sane.net/
cryptokit.ml.
I have also built Numerix and Cryptokit packages for Debian GNU/Linux, which
are likely to be incorporated into the next stable release along with an SKS
package that uses them. Candidate packages are on the same server, and I
have copied my prospective upload sponsor (Peter Palfrader,
weasel@debian.org) on this e-mail.
The only change required to the Cryptokit makefile is to replace nums.
{cma,cmxa} with numerix.{cma,cmxa}. I have had some problems with bytecodes
built this way ("unknown C primitive `unix_dup'"), perhaps related to a bug
in the Debian ocaml packaging; however, building optimized binaries for both
test and speedtest results in clean test runs. The Numerix.Slong
implementation performs RSA operations 10-30% faster than the original on my
Pentium IV. (As in the original, intermediate results are systematically
wiped rather than allowing them to be garbage collected while still
containing data.)
Thanks for writing Cryptokit, and I hope you will approve of my derivative
work. Comments and critiques are welcome; I am new to OCaml, so my style is
probably poor (although "wiping" considerations force some deviations from
functional style anyway).
Cheers,
- Michael
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