Re: PyCrypto rant thread

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Dwayne C. Litzenberger wrote, On 10/11/2008 02:25 AM:
> I'm sure there are a number of people on this list who are currently 
> _not_ using PyCrypto.  I know PyCrypto has problems, but as its new 
> maintainer, it would be useful for me to find out exactly what 
> problems others have had with it, so I can figure out what direction I 
> should go with it.

This thread is getting to closer and closer to being a rent thread as 
you intended ;-)

I have no strong feelings about PyCrypto or any of its alternatives.

Having one defacto standard implementation of anything is good. In one 
way. But having several competing alternatives is also very good. In 
another way.

I was looking for a python crypto library, and PyCrypto was one I was 
looking at. None of the candidates were obvious choices for me. You and 
others have pointed out places where PyCrypto had "room for 
improvement". Recognizing the problems and attacking them head on like 
you are doing is very good for the project.

It is obvious from this thread that you have strong opinions about this 
project. You have good reasons for doing what you are doing, and for why 
your approach - and the result - is better than the alternatives. PLEASE 
make this explicit in the documentation and on the web page. PLEASE help 
us to choose PyCrypto for the right reasons - or to go for one of the 
alternatives if that would make all of us happier. Biased but fair 
comparisions would be nice.

One important aspect which I had problems with and haven't seen 
mentioned is interoperability. It would be very helpful - both for 
evaluation and for debugging - to have examples of how PyCrypto can 
interface with and is compatible with other libraries. A real (or rather 
unrealistic) killer feature would be to have wrappers which implement 
(subsets) of the API of other libraries, so that their test suites could 
be run and examples compared.

/Mads

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