rotor replacement

[Paul Rubin]

Robin Becker <robin at SPAMREMOVEjessikat.fsnet.co.uk> writes:
> What exactly are/were the political reasons for rotor removal?

Some countries have laws about cryptography software (against some
combination of export, import, or use).  The Python maintainers didn't
want to deal with imagined legal hassles that might develop from
including good crypto functions in the distribution.  Then it became
obvious that the same imagined hassles could also befall the rotor
module, so that was removed.

> I might add that the source for rotormodule is still easily obtainable
> and can be compiled trivially as an extension for Python-2.4. Does the
> Python community take a position on the sources of removed modules?

Those are still free to distribute, but I'd advise against doing so
with the rotor module unless you absolutely need it for some
interoperability purpose.  Otherwise, it's insecure and should not be
used.  The routine I posted was intended as a straightforward
replacement for the rotor module that doesn't depend on C compilers
and is reasonably secure.  If you don't mind using C extensions,
there's various AES modules available, plus fancier packages like
mxCrypto.