Re: [Monotone-devel] 3rd party libraries

[Jack Lloyd]

[cc'ing botan-devel]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 11:19:21AM +0200, Markus Wanner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Zack Weinberg wrote:
> > I'm all for dynamic linking of botan, too, and being able to use the
> > accelerated engines.
> 
> Cool. I'm trying to keep up with the development of botan, test against
> new releases and potentially adopt to its changes. I'm eagerly awaiting
> 1.8, though. :-)

Me too.

The major stuff I have on my 1.8 roadmap that would break API at this
point is a rewrite/redesign of the libstate/engine code, and splitting
the public and private keys up.

The engine change is actually something Monotone could benefit from a
lot - right now it is pretty difficult (and in some cases downright
torturous) to precisely control which implementation of an algorithm
Botan is going to use, for instance. But I don't have a really firm
idea of what the new design would look like. So this may be deferred.

As to the keys - I've realized that deriving the private key classes
from the public keys was a mistake. Instead the private key should
have an operation public_key() that returns a new public key object.
I'd like to fix this sooner rather than later (eg, before 1.8). I
may give it a try this weekend, actually.

Long run I'd like to redesign/replace Filter/Pipe with something that
can handle fine-grained concurrency (with optional thread pool usage,
etc) in a clean way. That is a maybe-in-1.9 thing, though.

ECC still needs a great deal of profiling and optimization. ECDSA in
Botan is orders of magnitude slower than OpenSSL right now. (And also
hasn't really even been properly tested against a full set of
third-party test vectors).

I would really like to get 1.8.0 out the door before the end of the
year. We'll see.

-Jack