Deprecate this gem?

[tarcieri]

When I originally created RbNaCl back in 2012, it was hard to find native OS packages for libsodium, and so the "rbnacl-libsodium" gem was created as a convenience.

Unfortunately, it has grown into something of a maintenance nightmare for me. It's the equivalent work of trying to package libsodium for every OS, duplicating the efforts of the native OS packages, and becoming something of a jenga tower where fixing an issue for e.g. Windows breaks installation on certain Linux distros.

The way the gem works is something of an abuse of Ruby's native extension mechanism: it builds a fake extension using extconf.rb, but doesn't actually build it (so it can work on JRuby).

In the 6 years that have passed since I created RbNaCl, the OS packaging situation has changed: packages for libsodium are now readily available for all major operating systems.

Given how much of my time rbnacl-libsodium has taken up, how frustrating it's been (especially when I don't even personally use it anymore), and how much it duplicates OS packaging efforts, I'd really like to wash my hands of the entire thing. I am very, very tired of trying to maintain this thing and really just want it out of my life.

My deprecation plan would look something like:

• Release RbNaCl 6.0 which only works with libsodium installed as an OS package
• Attempting to use rbnacl-libsodium with RbNaCl 6.0+ would raise an exception
• Previous releases of RbNaCl and rbnacl-libsodium would continue to work, but print a deprecation warning

If someone is extremely committed to maintaining this gem, you can try to convince me to take over ownership. That said, I don't want to hand it over as-is to someone who wants to be a mere maintainer: if you want the rbnacl-libsodium name and upstream support in RbNaCl, the first thing you'd need to do to convince me you're serious is do the rewrite of this gem I have neither time nor interest to do. If I find it acceptable, I might consider transferring ownership of the gem name and continue upstream support in RbNaCl (some work would be needed there too).

Barring that, I plan on moving forward with the deprecation plan.

[perlun]

@tarcieri Sounds like a plan. I got here because I ran into #25 on MSYS2, i.e. Windows...

So whatever we do that can make things "more stable and easy to maintain" => go for it.

[tarcieri]

@perlun when I get around to removing rbnacl-libsodium support from RbNaCl-proper, it'd be great to have Windows users test prereleases to make sure I didn't break anything, and also give feedback on the Windows install instructions:

https://github.com/crypto-rb/rbnacl/wiki/Installing-libsodium#windows

[tarcieri]

Support for rbnacl-libsodium as a libsodium installation method was removed from the rbnacl gem:

RubyCrypto/rbnacl#180

[tarcieri]

RbNaCl 6.0.0 is out, and raises an exception if rbnacl-libsodium is detected.

This gem is officially deprecated.