Signal if there is an OpenSSL major version mismatch

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#99,951 7 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
security

Research direction

Review linked PR gh-100641 first, then trace how the embedded interpreter exposes or checks its OpenSSL version against the version used at Python build time. Done means a clear warning or fatal error is produced for a major-version mismatch, avoiding silent compatibility failures.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

extension-modules topic-SSL type-feature

Feature or enhancement

Implement some kind of obvious warning or even fatal error when the runtime OpenSSL major version does not match the one Python was compiled against.

Pitch

This is especially valid when using the embedded interpreter. I am developing a Node.js/Python compatiblity layer (https://github.com/mmomtchev/pymport) and Node.js exports the OpenSSL symbols it was built with. Python on Ubuntu 22.04 was compiled with libssl3 and it can't be used in any software compiled with libssl1. There is no magic solution to this problem, but printing a warning or even quitting with a fatal error would avoid wasting many hours debugging very hard to find crashes.

As we are currently right in the middle of the painful switch from OpenSSL 1 to OpenSSL 3, I am sure many will be thankful for this feature.

Previous discussion

This is a two-liner

Linked PRs
  • gh-100641
Dominant language
Python
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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