The developers of the Void Linux distribution have approved the proposal discussed since April of last year to revert to using the OpenSSL library. The switch from LibreSSL to OpenSSL is scheduled for March 5. It is expected that this change will not affect the systems of most users, but will significantly simplify the maintenance of the distribution and resolve many issues, such as enabling the building of OpenVPN with the standard TLS library (currently, due to issues with LibreSSL, the package is built with Mbed TLS). The price of reverting to OpenSSL will be the discontinuation of support for some packages that depend on the old OpenSSL API, which has been deprecated in the new branches of OpenSSL but was maintained in LibreSSL.
Previously, projects like Gentoo, Alpine, and HardenedBSD have already switched from LibreSSL to OpenSSL. The main reason for the return to OpenSSL was the growing incompatibility between LibreSSL and OpenSSL, which led to the need for supplying additional patches, complicating maintenance and making version upgrades more difficult. For example, the developers of Qt refuse to support LibreSSL, shifting the burden of resolving compatibility issues onto the distro developers, which requires significant additional effort for porting Qt6 when using LibreSSL.
Moreover, the development pace of OpenSSL has accelerated in recent years, with substantial work done to enhance the security of the codebase and add platform-specific optimizations, providing a full implementation of TLS 1.3. Using OpenSSL will also expand support for encryption algorithms in certain packages, for example, when building Python with LibreSSL, only a limited set of ciphers was included.
Source: opennet.ru
