[Pkg-openssl-devel] Behaviour of "x509 -text -out" changed between 1.0.1c (wheezy) and 1.0.1e (sid)

[Philipp A. Hartmann]

Hi,

I recently noticed that TinyCA [1] is broken on sid(unstable) machines
with OpenSSL 1.0.1e-1.  After a lot of debugging, I finally noticed that
the command-line behaviour of OpenSSL changed.

TinyCA extracts textual information from certificates via a command-line
like:

  openssl x509 -in /etc/ssl/certs/00673b5b.0 \
               -text -noout \
               -out /tmp/00673b5b.0.tmp

Until 1.0.1c-1 (wheezy), this has led to a certificate description in
text form written to the output file:

  $ openssl x509 ... | wc -l
  0
  $ wc -l /tmp/00673b5b.0.tmp
  57 /tmp/00673b5b.0.tmp

With the current version 1.0.1e-1 in unstable, this leads to an empty
output file with the certificate description still printed to stdout:

  $ openssl x509 ... | wc -l
  57
  $ wc -l /tmp/00673b5b.0.tmp
  0 /tmp/00673b5b.0.tmp

Has this been intentional?  This interface change should probably be
mentioned somewhere.  Creating an empty file with "-noout -out file" is
not really useful either.  Personally, I'd prefer the old behaviour over
the new one, though.

What do you think?

/Philipp

[1] http://packages.debian.org/tinyca

-- 
vay' DalarghDI' yIqaw