RFC: Adding Mac support to secur32/schannel.c

Francois Gouget fgouget at free.fr
Thu Feb 3 05:34:45 CST 2011


On Tue, 1 Feb 2011, Juan Lang wrote:
[...]
> I may be flogging a dead horse here, but I personally am loath to see
> another implementation creep in, side by side with the existing one,
> that has no guarantee of working any better.

As far as I understand it's not going to be another implementation. But 
you're probably right to warn about having multiple backends; that can 
be bad too as has been seen with sound.


> Worse, even if you succeed in fixing bugs for your Mac customers, the 
> rest of us don't benefit, as the current implementation still isn't 
> getting any support.

Not true. Anyone using Wine on Mac OS X will benefit by not having to 
hunt down for a non-standard library to either compile or run Wine. That 
means Mac users will be more likely to actually have a somewhat 
functional schannel. Even those who use a packaged Wine will benefit 
because it means they will no longer either receive an outdated GnuTLS 
library that contains vulnerabilities with their Wine, or have to hunt 
one down on their own, or have no schannel support.

You say that schannel needs a lot of improvement and you say that we/the 
community should work on that first. However making schannel perfect 
will not make the dependency on GnuTLS any more acceptable on Mac OS X. 
So both need to be done it's only a matter of 'in which order'?

Option 1
  1) Improve Mac support
  2) Improve schannel
  Drawback is (1) makes (2) much harder but this has not been 
  conclusively proven.

Option 2
  1) Improve schannel until it's 'good enough'
  2) Improve Mac support
  This means _most_ Mac users won't get any schannel support for a long 
  time. And in terms of development it means a big refactoring phase 
  near the end which may well be pretty disruptive too (hopefully it 
  wouldn't be as bad as the display backend or DIB engine refactoring).

Not that I care about schannel anyway.

-- 
Francois Gouget <fgouget at free.fr>              http://fgouget.free.fr/
                  In a world without fences who needs Gates?



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