> On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 21:00, Alexander Schrijver wrote:
> > I'm not sure how much, and if this breaks anything in Ports.
> >
> > According to github it isn't used much.
>
> We're going to keep this for a while. We would like to keep as much
> API compatibility as possible, even when the API is mostly useless.
>
> The exceptions are generally for APIs which simply cannot be used in a
> secure manner. Of course, there were other exceptions, when we tried
> to delete what appeared to be obsolete functions, but then we
> discovered people still use them, which created a mess.
>
> These functions don't appear particularly harmful.
I want to throw in a few words.
A fair amount of application code is written in a style of
#ifdef LINUX
a whole whack of code
#elif ANOTHERSYSTEM
the same code, with
with a small difference
#...
The abstractions taken by the developers are sometimes not as fine
as they could be.
The problem with removing APIs too quickly in libressl, is that while
we might see the OpenBSD ports works fine, the other code blocks on
other systems may use the API, and then fail.
At a much later time, after libressl is tried on those systems.
So for "fairly uncommon, not so scary, but stupid" APIs, we would
prefer to defer the deletion till a bit later.
