62.2 SXEmacs OpenSSL API

The SXEmacs OpenSSL API is intended to be an exact copy of the OpenSSL API functions in libcrypto and libssl. The intent is to provide elisp for everything you have told your OpenSSL library to contain. Then, at stage 2, let higher level Lisp code come up with policies and remove the guts of libcrypto and libssl.

Despite this rather noble intention of giving access to anything in OpenSSL there are conceptional limits. Auxiliary stuff from OpenSSL such as BIO or BN will not be accessible to elisp, though the C implementation might use them directly or indirectly as well.

On the one hand this is due to their very special purpose (like finding prime numbers), on the other hand due to their obsoleteness (like BIO_gets, BIO_do_connect, etc.) when SXEmacs already provides a similar or more powerful implementation.

For convenience, we denote the elisp implementation of OpenSSL with openssl whereas the distributed library package from http://www.openssl.org is denoted OpenSSL.