[pycrypto] Need your input: Major modernization; dropping legacy Python support?

[Philip Horger]

I think you're going to get mostly anecdotal answers to this, fairly
personal to whoever is answering it, but here's what I consider important:

   - Clean, modern, easy-to-use API (that limits your ability to
   accidentally misuse stuff)
   - Modularity
   - Rapid development/developer-friendly codebase
   - Nice documentation (willing to contribute to this personally)
   - Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)
   - Ability to install via pip, even on machines that don't already have
   libsomething installed.

Conversely, I don't care about the following (although some/many probably
will):

   - Backwards compatibility. As long as there's documentation, I'd rather
   deal with the byproducts of progress than a crippled interface.
   - Distro packaging.
   - Internal details of how PyCrypto works, as long as it fulfills the
   above wishlist.
   - Legacy Python versions (your definition matches mine).
   - License, so long as I can use it from an LGPL package (which seems
   compatible with Apache2)


Hopefully this feedback helps!

Philip Horger


On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 11:58 PM, Dave Pawson <dave.pawson at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 30 October 2013 06:09, Dwayne Litzenberger <dlitz at dlitz.net> wrote:
>
> > 1. How many of you would really care if PyCrypto 2.6 was that last
> > version to support legacy versions of Python?  By "legacy", I mean    all
> > versions of Python that are NOT one of these:
> >
> >     - Python 2.6.x
> >     - Python 2.7.x
> >     - Python 3.3 and above.
> >
> >    I'd continue to make bugfix releases of PyCrypto 2.6.x, but add no
> > more substantial new features.
>
> For some reason, Fedora is still pushing Python 2.7, so I'd be happy
> with this position.
>
>
>
>
> > 4. What if Crypto.* became a wrapper around some other crypto library?
>
> What logic please?
>
>
>
> > Of particular concern is FOSS distributors packaging PyCrypto (e.g.
>  Linux
> > distros, *BSD ports trees, MacPorts/HomeBrew, etc.), and anything else
> that
> > might impact a large number of downstream end-users.
>
> Fedora seems a long way behind with the Python versions.
>
>
> >
> > I'm beginning to wonder how the risk of downstream forks compares to the
> > risks that users face when developers still don't have a highly-visible,
> > easy-to-use Python crypto API.  It might be better to merge PyCrypto with
> > one or more other Python crypto libraries...
>
> I'll leave that to the more knowledgable.
> My position is I'm grateful for the code - meets my needs.
>
> regards
>
>
> --
> Dave Pawson
> XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
> Docbook FAQ.
> http://www.dpawson.co.uk
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>
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