[ libevent: why does it depend on openssl? ]
About to compile libevent from sources, I just noticed that it seems to have a dependency on OpenSSL for encryption o_O.
This sounds like bloat.
- What does a library that provides OS-independent asynchronous IO abstractions need encryption for?
- How can it justify a dependence on OpenSSL which I assume is also large and complicated?
libevent-2.0.21-stable/README
38 The configure script also supports the following flags:
39
40 --enable-gcc-warnings Enable extra compiler checking with GCC.
41 --disable-malloc-replacement
42 Don't let applications replace our memory
43 management functions
44 --disable-openssl Disable support for OpenSSL encryption.
45 --disable-thread-support Don't support multithreaded environments.
Answer 1
From whatsnew-2.0.txt:
5.4. SSL support for bufferevents with OpenSSL
There is now a bufferevent type that supports SSL/TLS using the
OpenSSL library. The code for this is build in a separate
library, libevent_openssl, so that your programs don't need to
link against OpenSSL unless they actually want SSL support.
There are two ways to construct one of these bufferevents, both
declared in <event2/bufferevent_ssl.h>. If you want to wrap an
SSL layer around an existing bufferevent, you would call the
bufferevent_openssl_filter_new() function. If you want to do SSL
on a socket directly, call bufferevent_openssl_socket_new().
It's for your convenience, if you need SSL sockets. If you do not need it, why not simply disable it using the option from the README snippet from your question?
