new testsuite errors with gcrypt 1.5 and gnutls 2.17.1

[Werner Koch]

On Mon, 25 Jul 2011 12:51, tmraz at redhat.com said:

> gcry_sexp_nth_mpi() ? Is there currently any known use in existing
> software that expects the GCRY_MPI_FMT_STD if 0 is specified as format
> in gcry_sexp_nth_mpi()?

We can't know for sure.  Libgcrypt is also used by proprietary
applications and thus we have no way to check it.

Before I released 1.5.0 I did a web search and found some code using
Libgcrypt.  Except for GnuPG and GNUTLS they all seemed to do it right.
Unfortunately I forgot to notify the GNUTLS maintainers.

I even pondered with a system wide Libgcrypt option to change the
default so that in case of a problem this could be easily fixed.
However that might be worse than just fixing the applications right
away.

It is clearly a bug but Libgcrypt and I prefer to fix bugs than to
maintain bug emulation code for all eternity.  There will be a GnuPG
2.0.18 shortly just to address this problem.  I have not heard about
other projects suffering from that bug.  gold(1) seems to be a more
severe problem than this bug fix.


Salam-Shalom,

   Werner


-- 
Die Gedanken sind frei.  Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz.