Lack of PEM pack support

[fwosar]

The new build system currently has no support for the Crypto++ PEM pack. In the past, to compile Crypto++ with PEM Pack support, you had to copy over the files into the sources folder, which were then included in the build process due to it using GLOB. This is essentially what the vcpkg package for Crypto++ does to this day. Since the new script uses a file list instead of a GLOB, would it be possible to optionally include the PEM pack files so Crypto++ can again be compiled with PEM pack support?

A similar issue is also open at vcpkg. It looks like the person who reported it never reported it upstream. Or at least I have yet to see them post here.

[abdes]

Definitely feasible.
It needs some thinking though as to whether to do it through copying source files to the crypto++ sources (which will result in a dirty repo for crypto++) or whether to add PEM as a full-fledged dependency.

[Vollstrecker]

I would vote for just downloading it as we do with the source and adding the sources from there. I just wanted to try to understand what the scripts there do, und maybe reimplement them in plain cmake so we don't have a dep on the scripting langs.

Maybe we could just do this in the pem repo itself, so we would just need to include it.

[fwosar]

The scripts and *.cxx files are used for automated testing within their CI pipeline. The actual code and PEM Pack functionality are within the *.h and *.cpp files. The Crypto++ wiki explicitly states just to include the source code files to add the PEM Pack support to Crypto++.

[Vollstrecker]

If we include the source into a binary, we should test the functionality of these parts also.

[SpaceCheetah]

Is there still a way to use the PEM pack?

[fwosar]

Since there is no movement in this, the easiest way to continue to use the PEM pack is to simply add the PEM pack files directly to your project. It's a bit of a shame, given that the PEM pack is sort of in this weird limbo state where it is clearly no longer maintained, but the official documentation is still referring to it.

EDIT: Just noticed that there still seems to be some bug fixing and maintenance going on, which is great. But unless the distribution issues are solved, it's of limited use.