Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo [LWN.net]

Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo

Posted Feb 13, 2021 13:43 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo by flussence
Parent article: Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo

libcurl is looking to add backends which are implemented in Rust. Now, I'm sure these will remain optional, but what is a distro to do: not ship the backends in the libcurl package or have a libcurl-with-rust replacement package. (Of course, this is moot if the backends are loaded dynamically and the Rust bits can just go into a new package; I just don't know.)

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Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo

Posted Feb 14, 2021 16:37 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

curl backends are largely not pluggable; a given build uses one backend of any given type, and that's it. (Hence a lot of distros ship several curl packages using different crypto backends.)

So it's easy to avoid rust usage in curl on platforms that don't support it: build in some other choice of backends that aren't implemented in Rust. Working on embedded systems with harsher constraints is why a lot of these backends exist in the first place (e.g. the mbedtls backend), so this is nothing new for curl.