Originally, MKCRYPTO was introduced because the United States
classified cryptography as a munition and restricted its export. The
export controls were substantially relaxed fifteen years ago, and are
essentially irrelevant for software with published source code.
In the intervening time, nobody bothered to remove the option after
its motivation -- the US export restriction -- was eliminated. I'm
not aware of any other operating system that has a similar option; I
expect it is mainly out of apathy for churn that we still have it.
Today, cryptography is an essential part of modern computing -- you
can't use the internet responsibly without cryptography.
The position of the TNF board of directors is that TNF makes no
representation that MKCRYPTO=no satisfies any country's cryptography
regulations.
My personal position is that the availability of cryptography is a
basic human right; that any local laws restricting it to a privileged
few are fundamentally immoral; and that it is wrong for developers to
spend effort crippling cryptography to work around such laws.
As proposed on tech-crypto, tech-security, and tech-userlevel to no
objections:
https://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-crypto/2017/05/06/msg000719.htmlhttps://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-security/2017/05/06/msg000928.htmlhttps://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-userlevel/2017/05/06/msg010547.html
P.S. Reviewing all the uses of MKCRYPTO in src revealed a lot of
*bad* crypto that was conditional on it, e.g. DES in telnet... That
should probably be removed too, but on the grounds that it is bad,
not on the grounds that it is (nominally) crypto.
libpthread_dbg(3) is a remnant library from the M:N thread model
(pre-NetBSD-5.0) API to introspect threads within a process and for use
of debuggers.
Currently in the 1:1 model it's not used in GDB neither in LLDB and it's
not either planned to be used. It's current function to read pthread_t
structures is realizable within a regular debugger capable to
instrospect objects within a tracee (GDB, LLDB...).
Remaining users of this API can still use this library from
pkgsrc/devel/libpthread_dbg.
Sponsored by <The NetBSD Foundation>
- convert to using ${EXTERNAL_GCC_SUBDIR}
- define base-external-gpl3-gcc* subdir as GCC_SUBDIR
- use <bsd.init.mk> over <bsd.own.mk> for a bunch of places; mostly
because it arranges for ../Makefile.inc to be included earlier, and
don't bother including the latter if the former is already included.
- move all .PATH: settings after <bsd.{own,lib}.mk> so that all
valid variables are set before it is evaluated
- rename mknative-gcc* to match their subdir name.
XXX the relationship between the Makefile.inc/Makefile.gcc_path files
is kind of sketchy, it would be great if this was fixed.