Re: Support for NSS as a libpq TLS backend

On Fri, Feb 4, 2022 at 1:22 PM Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb  3, 2022 at 02:33:37PM -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
> > As a philosophical matter, I don't think it's great for us - or the
> > Internet in general - to be too dependent on OpenSSL. Software
> > monocultures are not great, and OpenSSL has near-constant security
> > updates and mediocre documentation. Now, maybe anything else we
>
> I don't think it is fair to be criticizing OpenSSL for its mediocre
> documentation when the alternative being considered, NSS, has no public
> documentation.  Can the source-code-defined NSS documentation be
> considered better than the mediocre OpenSSL public documentation?

I mean, I think it's fair to say that my experiences with trying to
use the OpenSSL documentation have been poor. Admittedly it's been a
few years now so maybe it's gotten better, but my experience was what
it was. In one case, the function I needed wasn't documented at all,
and I had to read the C code, which was weirdly-formatted and had no
comments. That wasn't fun, and knowing that NSS could be an even worse
experience doesn't retroactively turn that into a good one.

> For the record, I do like the idea of adding NSS, but I am concerned
> about its long-term maintenance, we you explained.

It sounds like we come down in about the same place here, in the end.

-- 
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com