Hacker News Reader

Comment by splicer | Hacker News Reader

How about adding "completion of our manpages" or "making our website less shitty" to that list? See https://www.openssl.org/docs/

View on HN

Hmm, no I'd rather them make a quality product than work on their website.

The last thing OpenBSD or OpenSSL needs is a whack of totally-useless js on their website.

Documentation would be a HUGE help to the code quality of OpenSSL because someone would have to actually sit down and describe its ghastly interface. Whoever it was would get about half way through it and then stop and say "Wait, what? Seriously?"

The only other codebase I've seen that's remotely as hairy as OpenSSL is GCC's gnarly mess. (I've heard it's improved since I looked a few years ago.) And that's notoriously engineered to be difficult as possible to contribute without giving back; I can't imagine what OpenSSL's excuse is. Any sane programmer would have cold sweats even if they understood the implementation because it's so difficult to figure out and verify what the fuck is going on internally with any speed.

Documentation would help, but a good cleanup would make provided documentation much less necessary. Crypto may be difficult to understand, but with clean coding practices and formal verification (even on an audit workflow level) would be a much better investment, IMHO.

I didn't mention javascript. Try running their site through a validator: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.openssl....

Duplicate IDs and font tags? Come on...

But it works, right?

For what it's worth, OpenSSL and OpenBSD/OpenSSH are not maintained by the same team, even though the names are similar. This was what I was given to understand last week after answers to a slew of questions asking about this.

Ah, now all my downvotes make sense ;) The article gave me the impression that OpenBSD was the maintainer of OpenSSL.

>How about adding "completion of our manpages"

That is pretty much a given. OpenBSD considers deficiencies in documentation the same as deficiencies in the software.

>or "making our website less shitty"

OpenBSD developers have nothing to do with openssl's website.

If it's a given, then why do all 3 manpages on https://www.openssl.org/docs/ say "[STILL INCOMPLETE]" and have for years?

Edit: I just read parennoob's comment about how OpenBSD isn't the maintainer of OpenSSL. I didn't know this was the case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com