libgcrypt - The GNU crypto library ------------------------------------ Version 1.1.43 Copyright 2000, 2002, 2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This file is free software; as a special exception the author gives unlimited permission to copy and/or distribute it, with or without modifications, as long as this notice is preserved. This file is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT VERSION, THE FIRST STABLE VERSION WILL BE 1.2.0. Overview -------- Libgcrypt is a general purpose crypto library based on the code used in GnuPG. We can't start with a new version number because libgcrypt was part of gnupg 1.1 and some applications already used it and tested for the version number. We believe that the API can stay as it is, except that new functions may be added in the future. Libgcrypt depends on the library `libgpg-error', which must be installed correctly before Libgcrypt is to be built. CVS --- If you are using the CVS version, make sure that you have the latest GNU build tools installed and run ./autogen.sh before trying to build the library. Instead of running autogen.sh, something like `autoreconf -i --symlink' can be used to prepare the tree for building as well. You also need to enable maintainer mode at configure time with the `--enable-maintainer-mode' configure switch; without this switch, the documentation can not be build, since the file `version.texi', which is needed for building the documentation, will only be generated, if maintainer mode is enabled. Mailing List ------------ You may want to join the developer's mailing list gcrypt-devel@gnupg.org by sending mail with a subject of "subscribe" to gcrypt-devel-request@gnupg.org. An archive of this list is available at http://lists.gnupg.org . License ------- Most of this library is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL); see the file COPYING.LIB for the actual terms. However some parts are distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) so if you configure Libgcrypt to include these modules, you have to comply with the conditions of the GPL as found in the file COPYING. The modules under the GPL are: rndunix - Entropy gatherer for Unices without a /dev/random rndw32 - Entropy gatherer for MS Windows The documentation is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; see the file COPYING.DOC for the terms. This library used to be available under the GPL - this was changed with version 1.1.7 with the rationale that there are now many free crypto libraries available and many of them come with capabilities similar to Libcrypt. We decided that to foster the use of cryptography in Free Software an LGPLed library would make more sense because it avoids problems due to license incompatibilities between some Free Software licenses and the GPL. Please note that in many cases it is better for a library to be licensed under the GPL, so that it provides an advantage for free software projects. The Lesser GPL is so named because it does less to protect the freedom of the users of the code that it covers. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html for more explanation. Configure options ----------------- Here is a list of configure options which are sometimes useful for installation. --enable-m-guard Enable the integrated malloc checking code. Please note that this feature does not work on all CPUs (e.g. SunOS 5.7 on UltraSparc-2) and might give you a bus error. --disable-asm Do not use assembler modules. It is not possible to use this on some CPU types. --enable-ld-version-script Libgcrypt tries to build a library where internal symbols are not exported. This requires support from ld and is currently enabled for a few OSes. If you know that your ld supports the so called ELF version scripts, you can use this option to force its use. OTOH, if you get error message from the linker, you probably want to use this option to disable the use of version scripts. Note, that you should never ever use an undocumented symbol or one which is prefixed with an underscore. --enable-ciphers=list --enable-pubkey-ciphers=list --enable-digests=list If not otherwise specified, all algorithms included in the libgcrypt source tree are built. An exception are algorithms, which depend on features not provided by the system, like 64bit data types. With these switches it is possible to select exactly those algorithm modules, which should be built.