[Haskell-cafe] SSL support for hackage and cabal

[Michael Snoyman]

FWIW, I went through this exact decision making process about 2 years ago
when working on TLS support in http-conduit[1] and came to the conclusion
that the best choice by far was using Vincent's tls package. I've been very
happy with the results. Not only is Yesod used on a number of platforms,
but I've shipped commercial software to both Windows and Mac, and having
one less system library to worry about saved me lots of pain[2].

[1] Actually, the only reason I ever wrote http-conduit instead of just
using HTTP was that I needed TLS support for OpenID, and I could never get
the existing TLS-in-HTTP-package solutions to work.
[2] An example to the contrary to text-icu, which to this day I cannot
reliably get installed on a Windows system.


On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Carter Schonwald <carter.schonwald at gmail.com
> wrote:

> agreed, would likely be a portability nightmare, and the cabal devs have
> enough on their plate as is!
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 1:35 AM, Vincent Hanquez <tab at snarc.org> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
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