Subject: Re: muhah
To: Trevor Johnson <trevor@jpj.net>
From: Alistair Crooks <agc@pkgsrc.org>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 03/22/2001 09:24:33
On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 12:12:33PM -0500, Trevor Johnson wrote:
> > Log Message:
> > Add MD2, MD4, SHA1, and RMD160 support to cksum.  Adding new hashes to
> > cksum(1) should now be easy.
> 
> These are all available from OpenSSL (openssl --list-digest-commands).

This is tech-pkg, and here we're talking about pkgsrc. I already went over
why I didn't want to use openssl to calculate message digests, but a
management summary would be:

1.  openssl is huge, and I don't want pkgsrc to be reliant upon a huge
piece of software as a basic building block.  libtool not withstanding.

2.  openssl produces output in a slightly different format from
md5(1).  I really don't want to have to pre-process everything with
sed or awk or expr.

3.  I want a message digest calculation utility that is small and
quick, and something that either is present on all Operating Systems
on which pkgsrc runs, or is buildable on those operating systems with
minimum fuss. openssl does not really fit the bill here.

Regards,
Alistair