Maintainers of CURL, MUTT, PYTHON and WGET, heads up!

Corinna Vinschen vinschen@redhat.com
Mon Jan 14 02:26:00 GMT 2002


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Hi,

I'm going to update OpenSSL from version 0.9.6b to version 0.9.6c
very soon now, probably next Sunday.

You as the maintainers of the packages who depend on OpenSSL should
check, if the existing binary packages will still run when I upgrade.

The reasons I'm asking are

- the fifth package depending on OpenSSL, OpenSSH, would have been
  broken by an upgrade.  That's the reason I've uploaded a new version
  of OpenSSH a few hours ago.

- The next OpenSSL binary package will not include support for two
  crypto algorithms which still have licensing problems in some
  contries, IDEA and RC5.

So I'd like to ask you to check if your packages will still run
with an patchlevel upgrade of OpenSSL.  Otherwise I'd suggest to
patch the code which checks the OpenSSL version (if any).  The
version of OpenSSL is returned by the function SSLeay().  It returns
a hex number with the format

  MMNNFFPPS: M = major, N = minor, F = fix, p = patch, s = status.

Accordingly the release version 0.9.6b returns

  SSLeay() =  0x00090602f	== 0 9 6 b and f=release

the release version 0.9.6c returns

  SSLeay() =  0x00090602f       == 0 9 6 c f=release

Description is in `man 3 OPENSSL_VERSION_NUMBER'.

The situation in OpenSSH was, OpenSSH-3.0.2p1 unfortunately checks
for exact equality against the version number of OpenSSL which is
linked against:

  if ((SSLeay() != OPENSSL_VERSION_NUMBER)
    exit

The current CVS version of OpenSSH contains a patch which checks
for the version but w/o checking for the patch level:

  if ((SSLeay() ^ OPENSSL_VERSION_NUMBER) & ~0xff0L)
    exit

I patched OpenSSH-3.0.2p1-4 so that it also uses that test.  This
version will have no problem when I upgrade to OpenSSL-0.9.6c.

Please make sure that your package will still run next Sunday.
I'm not going to use a different name for the DLL since it's
not a version upgrade, just a patchlevel upgrade.  The shared
libs on U*X systems would still use the same name either
(libcrypto.0.9.6.so, libssl.0.9.6.so).

The next point is, please check if your packages depend on either
the IDEA or the RC5 algorithms.  If so, please rebuild w/o that
dependency.

Thanks,
Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Developer                                mailto:cygwin@cygwin.com
Red Hat, Inc.



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