Commit 2527b94f authored by Dr. Stephen Henson's avatar Dr. Stephen Henson
Browse files

Upate FAQ. 

Add description of "allocate and encode" operation for ASN1 routines.

Document how versioning will for after the letter release reaches
y.
parent d980abb2

FAQ

+22 −1
Original line number Diff line number Diff line
@@ -189,6 +189,12 @@ Therefore the answer to the common question "when will feature X be 
backported to OpenSSL 1.0.0/0.9.8?" is "never" but it could appear

in the next minor release.



* What happens when the letter release reaches z?



It was decided after the release of OpenSSL 0.9.8y the next version should

be 0.9.8za then 0.9.8zb and so on.





[LEGAL] =======================================================================



* Do I need patent licenses to use OpenSSL?
@@ -864,7 +870,7 @@ The opposite assumes we already have len bytes in buf: 
 p = buf;

 p7 = d2i_PKCS7(NULL, &p, len);



At this point p7 contains a valid PKCS7 structure of NULL if an error

At this point p7 contains a valid PKCS7 structure or NULL if an error

occurred. If an error occurred ERR_print_errors(bio) should give more

information.
@@ -876,6 +882,21 @@ that has been read or written. This may well be uninitialized data 
and attempts to free the buffer will have unpredictable results

because it no longer points to the same address.



Memory allocation and encoding can also be combined in a single

operation by the ASN1 routines:



 unsigned char *buf = NULL;	/* mandatory */

 int len;

 len = i2d_PKCS7(p7, &buf);

 if (len < 0)

	/* Error */

 /* Do some things with 'buf' */

 /* Finished with buf: free it */

 OPENSSL_free(buf);



In this special case the "buf" parameter is *not* incremented, it points

to the start of the encoding.





* OpenSSL uses DER but I need BER format: does OpenSSL support BER?