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Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

1. The OpenSSL API hasn't changed, and if Apple changed it on their own that would break more things

2. The issue the author complained about was `openssl --help` not working, and it doesn't work on any platform (because he got the command wrong). `openssl help` does work on OSX (I literally just tested it).

3. Yeah, that's the one issue we agree is an Apple issue.

4. Apple didn't make LibreSSL. Other systems besides Apple use LibreSSL, and the authors complaints about their lack of documentation are relevant regardless of what Apple does.

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> 4. Apple didn't make LibreSSL. Other systems besides Apple use LibreSSL, and the authors complaints about their lack of documentation are relevant regardless of what Apple does.

No, this is specifically Apple's fuck up. The documentation is right there on OpenBSD! It pretty much always was. I have a live system running OpenBSD older than this rant, and the man pages are there. The default modulus is 2048 too.

> I have a live system running OpenBSD older than this rant, and the man pages are there. The default modulus is 2048 too.

That's pretty hilarious if Apple changed the default from 2048 to 512!

> 4. Apple didn't make LibreSSL. Other systems besides Apple use LibreSSL, and the authors complaints about their lack of documentation are relevant regardless of what Apple does.

Other systems probably upgrade their copy of BSD userland more than once a decade... especially if they are the richest company on Earth.

There are probably 100 other user rants to accompany this for all the other massively out of date bits of BSD on MacOS.

> `openssl help` does work on OSX (I literally just tested it).

For anyone else interested, I just tested it as well. It appears that it prints a listing of all the commands offered by openssl (split into sections "Standard commands", "Message Digest commands", and "Cipher commands"), with no other descriptions or usage instructions. I tried `openssl help bf` to get more information, and it prints the options available to that command and their descriptions. I did not see any way to actually figure out what a command does, but it is possible I missed it.

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