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Message-ID: <20261112135501.GI5716@brightrain.aerifal.cx>
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2026 08:55:01 -0500
From: Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org>
To: Vincent Lefevre <vincent@...c17.net>,
Alejandro Colomar <alx+linux-man@...nel.org>,
Alejandro Colomar <alx@...nel.org>, linux-man@...r.kernel.org,
libc-alpha@...rceware.org, Walter Harms <wharms@....de>,
~hallyn/shadow@...ts.sr.ht, musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Re: [PATCH v1] man/man3/crypt.3: These functions accept
many algorithms, not only DES
On Thu, Nov 12, 2026 at 02:45:16PM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2026-11-12 14:23:08 +0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > Hmm, yeah, I didn't intend to say POSIX is bad; I just wanted to let
> > people know that POSIX is irrelevant about crypt(3) these days (as Rich
> > said). Perhaps:
> >
> > The POSIX specification is significantly outdated,
> > and all systems extend it significantly.
> >
> > What do you think?
>
> OK for me.
It's not "outdated". It just does not mandate particular algorithms
but leaves these choices up to the implementation. As usual the scope
of POSIX is what applications need to know to interface with the
system, not administrative policy. This is why POSIX doesn't define
things like mount, how init works, etc. either. They are in the scope
of things that applications generally don't have to care about; only
system components do.
I do think there are changes to the POSIX crypt spec that could make
it better, like defining more errors and specifying explicitly that
salts beginning with '$' and '_' select additional
implementation-defined algorithms and settings, etc. But overall the
issue here is just a difference in expectation, not anything
inherently bad.
Rich
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