Re: [Bug-wget] Current wget --version is slightly screwy

[Micah Cowan]

On 11/07/2010 04:45 PM, Giuseppe Scrivano wrote:
> Hello Micah,
> 
> we can assume md5 is always present, this is what the gnulib
> guarantees.

Yeah, that's always been the case. The question has always been: from
where did we get our md5 implementation? builtin, openssl, or ...? We
used to prefer openssl's and then fallback on a builtin one (which
probably came from libiberty, and shares parentage with gnulib's). In
some circumstances we also used another source (one provided on Sun OS
or OpenSolaris). This tag's purpose was to identify which one was being
used, so if anything went wrong, we'd know whose md5 implementation to
blame :)

> I am not sure if somebody is using this information so it is better to
> use a constant "+md5" or if we have to drop it completely from the build
> info output.  I am a bit tempted by the later solution.

Should never be +md5, since that's useless information (MD5 is always
implemented, or wget wouldn't work). Used to be one of +md5/builtin,
+md5/openssl or +md5/solaris. If we always get it from gnulib, then we
can just pull this tag out, as the "which source" question is no longer
relevant. If that's not guaranteed, though, then we should ideally go
back to identifying which implementation we'll be using.

I very much doubt anyone's really using the information yet, since Wget
1.12 was the first release to have these tags anyway, and I can't really
imagine non-developers caring which MD5 implementation is used.

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
http://micah.cowan.name/