[pycrypto] RSA exportKey question

[Legrandin]

Hi Kurt , thanks a lot for providing feedback. It is much appreciated.

* I guess you refer to camel-casing used for several variables, which
was due to my preference to stick to ASN.1 naming.
  I can work on that and make sure flake8 does not complain that much.

* Right. Code evolved at different points in time, and indeed it is
now hard to follow the path of the 'parameter' value. I will try to
fix that.

* I used strings like 'PBKDF2WithHMAC-SHA1AndAES128-CBC' because that
is the style used in JCA and BouncyCastle and a lot of people are
familiar with it.
  I am not very clear what the benefit enums might bring? One option I
considered was the ability to provide 3 independent parameters
  instead of one (since protection mainly depends on type of KDF, PRF,
and symmetric cipher) but at the end I guess most
  uses case are about the desire to protect the private key using a
password in a strong way, and the ability to tweak the various
parameters
  is not that relevant. Plus, exportKey() parameter list becomes to long.

* I am really ashamed to admit that I actually have 9 pull requests
open, not 2 so I am totally giving headaches to the maintainer. :-)
  It is of course only up to him to decide which features should go
in; given that he has not much time these days, it is likely that only
  few features and bugfixes may go into any next release.
  The release merge window seems to roughly be once per year and I
find it is natural to have so many outstanding pull requests by now.
  To my defense, I can only say that the all pull requests cover one
feature only and that I try to keep them as independent as possible.
  Most of them apply cleanly to master (e.g. HKDF, CCM, PKCS#8, bug fixes, etc).
  In some cases though, they do depend on an existing pull request (as
in the case of DSA import/export depending on PKCS8 be applied first),
  because keeping them separated is honestly too much work for me
*and* they are indeed extensions of other extensions.

> Hi, I was looking at the pycrypto pull request
> https://github.com/dlitz/pycrypto/pull/32.  Just a few comments...
>
> * For readability can you pep8 format the code?
> * RSA, for import/export the protection parameter maybe rename to algo or
> wrap algo?  It evolves from: 'protection' to 'wrap_algo' to 'mode' as it
> goes down the call stack.
> * Also maybe make this parameter an enum/value?  Since the long string can
> be error prone, low level code would need to change anyway if it were either
> string or int if we support more modes.
> * And last but not least... I'm new to this email list and not sure how
> often pull requests are accepted but maybe you could reduce the amount of
> features going in?  I know you have another one, 51, after this...
> Maintainer may reluctant to do massive changes all at once?
>
> Anyway just ideas...
> Thanks for your time,
> Sincerely,
> Kurt
>