At $work, an application that uses SSL sockets began to crash with the following error message after a system upgrade:

Can't locate auto/Net/SSLeay/SSL_alert_d.al in @INC (@INC contains: /u
+sr/bin/../../lib /usr/bin/.. /usr/bin/../.. /usr/bin/../lib /usr/loca
+l/lib64/perl5/5.36 /usr/local/share/perl5/5.36 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendo
+r_perl /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5 /usr/share/perl5
+) at /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/IO/Socket/SSL.pm line 3685.

[download]

The offending line, which was introduced in IO::Socket::SSL 2.076, is this:

            $msg_name = eval { Net::SSLeay::SSL_alert_desc_string_long
+($msg_type) } || "Unknown alert";

[download]

But it is possible to trigger a similar error with just

perl -MNet::SSLeay -le 'print Net::SSLeay::SSL_alert_desc_string_long(
+1)'

[download]

This function seems to be a well-established exported function of OpenSSL, which is exposed to the Perl module in SSLeay.xs. The SSLeay.so library certainly has a similarly named symbol. But the error message, with the truncated function name seems to indicate that some breakage is going on around function export/import/autoloading.

My questions:

  1. This looks like a bug, but where to report to? IO::Socket::SSL, because it uses a function it's (possibly) not supposed to, or Net::SSLeay, because they have this weirdly broken function in the first place?
  2. Looking at Net::SSLeay's code as it is deployed, it has a bunch of these .al files in the auto/Net/SSLeay directory. Apparently these are created by AutoSplit which is a part of Autoload or something. But the functions in those files seem to exist in SSLeay.pm as well, so what is the point of this nonsense?

In reply to Can't locate auto/Net/SSLeay/SSL_alert_d.al by kikuchiyo

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