Re: [PATCH] gnu: Add libsodium

["Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu>]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 8:48 AM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> However, the web page reads:
>
>   In order to pick the fastest working implementation of each primitive,
>   NaCl performs tests and benchmarks at compile-time.  Unfortunately,
>   the resulting library is not guaranteed to work on different hardware.
>
> Which means that Hydra would end up building a version that uses the
> specific ISA extensions that happened to be available on the build
> machine, which in turn might be unavailable on the user’s machine.
>
> Is there a way to disable the compile-time magic, and instead let
> libsodium make the choice at run time?  GMP has --enable-fat for that
> purpose.

Well, Sodium is a fork on NaCL, and underneath that paragraph it reads:

  Sodium performs tests at run-time, so that the same binary package
can still run everywhere.

So, I think we are okay!  This is a good advantage of Sodium over NaCl.

With that concern out of the way, okay to push?

> PS: Apparently this NaCl is unrelated to Google’s NaCl sandboxing
>     thing; terrible!

Confused me as well.

Thanks.  I appreciate your thorough reviews.

- Dave