patch for cipher/sha512.c (u64 numbers) [phylosophycal note]

[Werner Koch]

On Sat, 10 May 2003 16:47:37 +0400, Max V Zinal said:

> Just a note: the whole GnuPG project is moving closer and
> closer to a "just use GCC" paradigm. This might be a good

Definitely not. 

TIGER (which will be removed from OpenPGP anyway) and SHA-384/512 are
optional and don't make much sense now.  We provide them now in a
"read-only" mode to establish an implementation base so that
eventually (in a couple of years) they can be used without much
interop problems.  Using them today will only cause trouble for most
users.

TIGER has always been available only for platforms supporting a 64 bit
integer type.  gcc provides this on most platforms so I mentioned
that gcc may be used if your compiler is buggy and you have no way to
get it fixed. 

I'd really love to use gcc and glibc solely because it saves so much
time for a developer.  However. we stick to POSIX and support even
awkward old non-POSIX systems as much as possible.  For Windows we
support only the mingw32/cpd cross compiler because we have control
over the compiler and runtime lib and thus can implement features to
minimize ifdefs in the code.

Portability bugs take up a lot of our time (my guess is at least 30%
without even counting Windows) and we must somehow cope with that.  If
there is an extra gadget in GnuPG which needs a lot of time and code
to make it run on all platforms, we have to decide whether it is
important or not.  We are doing this without actually getting paid for
this and some of us need to make a living from software.  At one point
it would not be possible anymore to keep all platforms running and to
continue development.

Anyway, in this case David fixed it in a way which should make almost
all users happy.  Thanks.


Salam-Shalom,

   Werner


p.s.
Recently I was able to do some fixes for using GnuPG on a uClinux
system - this happened only because one client actually paid for
this...

-- 
  Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of
  mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of
  destruction devised by the ingenuity of man. -Gandhi