* * * * *

           This is why I tend towards writing my own code libraries

Six years ago I had the need to fetch an image via HTTP as part of testing
“Project: Lumbergh [1].” At the time, I thought You know what? Why don't I
use libcurl? It's installed. It's supposedly easy to use. It'll save me the
hour or so it'll take me to write the code to connect to the server, send the
request and read the reply.

It still took about an hour, mainly to figure out how to use the darned
library. But it worked.

And then I went to test on Solaris (which is what production runs on) and
well …

> r2839 | spc | 2012-07-11 14:22:27 -0400 (Wed, 11 Jul 2012) | 8 lines
>
> [Testing]
>
> It's amazing what isn't installed on Solaris.
>
> And yes, I do use curl for testing. Easy (if insanely large) library to use
> to snarf down web requests.
>

I had to download libcurl and check it into the repository because it's not
on Solaris.

And then I had to figure out the special ./configure options to get it
compiled under Solaris.

And then I had to wait for ./configure and make to run (and on Solaris, this
is a S—L——O———W————P—————P——————R———————O————————C—————————E——————————S——————
——————S).

And then I had to figure out how to integrate this into the build system for
Solaris.

And for something that was supposed to be “easy to use” turned out to be not
so easy. Nor quick. And has been a thorn in my side these past six years.

Seven years ago I wrote a Lua module to generate hashes [2]. Instead of
pulling the code from various [3] RFCs [4], I thought I would link to OpenSSL
[5], since it already included the code for the various hashes, and who knows
it might even be optimized.

This only took a few moments to implement and was rather easy.

Until Apple [6] decided to deprecate the use of OpenSSL on Mac OS-X and later
remove OpenSSL in their latest offerings.

I use said Lua module at work.

We mostly develop under Mac OS-X.

Sigh.

This has become a thorn in my side over the past few years. The issue came up
two weeks ago when my fellow cow-orker TS, decided to update his Mac OS-X
laptop and the build broke. And it came up today because my other fellow cow-
orker TS-II (same initials—go figure) did some update or other on his Mac OS-
X laptop and the build broke, but in a different way (wow—to think that each
version of Mac OS-X is a special snowflake).

Two libraries, used to avoid the whole “Not Invented Here Syndrome [7]” and
to speed up development.

In both cases, it has not speed up development. It has slowed down
development as I've had to find more and more ways to keep using these
infernal libraries.

I guess I'll spend a few hours ripping out libcurl and OpenSSL and replacing
it with code I've written to speed things up around here.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2018/09/11.2
[2] https://github.com/spc476/lua-conmanorg/blob/master/src/hash.c
[3] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1321.txt
[4] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3174.txt
[5] https://www.openssl.org/
[6] https://www.apple.com/
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here#In_computing

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