OpenSSL Communities

Feedback on changing the code style

DB Dmitry Belyavsky Thu 23 Oct 2025 3:11PM Public Seen by 24

(Thanks to Barry Fussell for the text)


During the OpenSSL conference a change in source code style was proposed.

One the main purposes of this change was to improve the PR process.

The slides from the presentation are here:

https://2025.openssl-conference.org/speaker-sessions/detail-195_1292952#sectionLink

Please share any question, comments, concerns here so we can share with the Corporation TAC .

KR

Kurt Roeckx Thu 23 Oct 2025 6:13PM

This is going to cause problems for backporting patches for most distros I think. For Debian is should be fine.

I do wonder if the plan is to do this for all branches. Doing it will probably make it easier for OpenSSL to backport patches, but makes little difference for most distros.

I think that doing a whole reformat is a bad idea.

KT

Klaus Triendl Tue 28 Oct 2025 12:58PM

From personal experience a technically enforced code formatting is good because it becomes almost a no-brainer in everyday work - you just forget to think about it. Any coding style will do, clang-format (or any other code formatting tool) is configurable with settings you agree upon as a team.

In my opinion, this should be done in one go so that the process does not drag on too long.

Backporting patches becomes more problematic due to increasing conflicts, however they need to be reviewed carefully anyway, and from there will make it into distros?

Also, if a distro is very actively maintained, it will (and should) follow OpenSSL's lead. This sounds very simple on paper of course, but you cannot prevent the future.