On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 10:36 AM, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos n.mavrogiannopoulos@gmail.com wrote:
As the ABI broke anyway in 3.0, would it make sense to merge the nettle and hogweed libraries? Hogweed cannot be used without linking to libnettle, thus the advantage of the current split is only to applications that only use libnettle. Nevertheless, I don't think there are such applications. My guess is that the ones that simply need sha1, would avoid linking to nettle and just copy the algorithms they need internally. In any embedded system using nettle+hogweed would require more memory and overhead than having a single library. That is of course not a very significant overhead, but it harms the actual programs it targets to help.
Also maybe it is time to introduce symbol versioning. As nettle 2.7 will be present for quite some time in desktops it would be good to avoid conflicts between libraries that are linked with nettle-2.7 and programs that are linked with nettle-3.0 (or vice-versa).
regards, Nikos