[nulltrace]

Fair, but from the user side it still hurts. Setting up an Ed25519 signing context used to be maybe ten lines. Now you're constructing OSSL_PARAM arrays, looking up providers by string name, and hoping you got the key type right because nothing checks at compile time.

[wahern]

Yeah. Some of the more complex EVP interfaces from before and around the time of the forks had design flaws, and with PQC that problem is only going to grow. Capturing the semantics of complex modes is difficult, and maybe that figured into motivations. But OSSL_PARAMs on the frontend feels more like a punt than a solution, and to maintain API compatibility you still end up with all the same cruft in both the library and application, it's just more opaque and confusing figuring out which textual parameter names to use and not use, when to refactor, etc. You can't tag a string parameter key with __attribute__((deprecated)). With the module interface decoupled, and faster release cadence, exploring and iterating more strongly typed and structured EVP interfaces should be easier, I would think. That's what the forks seem to do. There are incompatibilities across BoringSSL, libressl, etc, but also cross pollination and communication, and over time interfaces are refined and unified.