Fedora 28 Looking To Replace Glibc's libcrypt With libxcrypt

As upstream Glibc is working on deprecating libcrypt for its eventual removal from the codebase, Fedora developers are looking at using libxcrypt for their hashing/encoding crypto library.

Some Fedora / Red Hat developers have been working on libxcrypt as the distribution's potential replacement to libcrypt. Libxcrypt is inspired in part by Openwall Linux, supports most all password hashing algorithms, offers a faster development cycle, and makes adding new hashing algorithms easy.

Details on Fedora's plans for using libxcrypt as a replacement to libcrypt are outlined via this Wiki page. If all goes well, the changeover of the crypt library will happen for the Fedora 28 release due out in March.

Libxcrypt is hosted on GitHub and can also be found packaged on Debian/Ubuntu and some other distributions.