[needs-packaging] PySkein

[Jason Gerard DeRose]

PySkein is an extension module for Python, implementing the Skein hash algorithm, one of the finalists in the NIST SHA-3 Competition. While originally based on the optimized version of the reference implementation by Doug Whiting, PySkein is now feature complete and offers a pythonic interface, all released as free software under the GNU General Public License.

Homepage: http://packages.python.org/pyskein/

Features:

 * Simple interface following the hash algorithms in the Python standard library (like hashlib.sha1 or hashlib.sha256)

 * All features of the Skein specification (flexible digest sizes, MAC generation, tree hashing, and various other arguments)

 * High performance through optimized C implementation (7.1 cycles/byte for sequential hashing and 4.2 cycles/byte for tree hashing on two cores, measured on an Athlon 64 X2)

 * Threefish, the tweakable block cipher used in Skein, available for encryption and decryption on its own

Upstream authors:

| Hagen Fürstenau <email address hidden>

Copyright and license:

| Copyright 2008-2010 Hagen Fürstenau <email address hidden>
|
| PySkein is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
| it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
| the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
| (at your option) any later version.
|
| This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
| but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
| MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
| GNU General Public License for more details.
|
| You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
| along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

[Thanks to hakermania on revu for pointing me to a great example needs-packaging bug!]

[Jason Gerard DeRose (jderose)]

Few notes:

1) I'm maintaining debian/ under version control in lp:~pyskein/pyskein/packaging

2) There are builds of the work-in-progress packages in this PPA - https://launchpad.net/~pyskein/+archive/stable

3) The `skeinsum` and `threefish` don't yet have man pages, for which I opened lp:711082