No more plug-ins?

Werner Koch wk@gnupg.org
Fri Aug 9 20:55:01 2002


On Fri, 9 Aug 2002 09:03:33 -0500, David Champion said:

>     1. IDEA support. (I won't mean to get into arguments about this. I
>     work for a nonprofit institution, so our use is noncommercial, and
>     we can legally use it.)

It is still there as long as the system supports dlopen or is Windows.
As an alternative you may simply copy idea.c into the cipher/
directory and it will be statically linked.

>     2. User-selectable RNGs. We run mostly on Solaris. Some machines
>     have a real /dev/random, and use rndlinux. Others do not and can
>     not, so we use rndegd or rndunix, depending on circumstances. With

I understand.  Is it really a problem?  We could link all in and have
an option to enable them - shall I consider this?

> I still don't really understand why you're so opposed to the plugins,
> aside from irritation about people's using IDEA at all, but maybe that's

I know that you tweaked a lot of things to make the plugins work on
Solaris but problems with the dynamic linking are still a large
percentage of build problems.  By removing this I hope to make it
easier for most people.  And there is of course a security issue due
to the extra code required for loading it, and the code has never been
very pretty.



Shalom-Salam,

   Werner