[Haskell-cafe] SSL support for hackage and cabal

[Vincent Hanquez]

On 2013-11-04 01:02, Donn Cave wrote:
> How strongly do you feel about the cross platform and dependency issues?
Quite ? I think that would be rather bad to have cabal have ssl on unix, but
not on MacOSX and Windows.

> When I needed SSL encryption, I whipped up a little module with foreign
> calls to OpenSSL.  For an ordinary client, which is all I use it for any
> more, it's a simple interface -- init, connect, read, write, a couple
> error functions.  I have to link -lssl -lcrypto.  The great thing about
> this is, not only do I have a high degree of confidence in the implementation,
> I don't expect it to _ever_ change in a way that will inconvenience me.
> If my application ever needs to work on a platform with a different SSL,
> just need a new module with init/connect/write etc.
>
> Does that seem like a possibility, just write minimal interfaces to
> existing platform standard SSL implementations, and move on to more
> interesting problems?  Or is this really an area with interesting problems
> of its own that I'm missing?
>
I think that's the best alternative (provided wide spread non support 
for tls),
except there's no platform standards (think about chromium, and mozilla
cases for a very similar problem), and it's probably going to be 
"interesting"
to maintain (as in it take probably quite a bit of resource for browsers 
to keep on top).

--
Vincent