Optional openssl

[joshniemela]

OpenSSL can often be annoying to use as a build dependency and it should be possible to use the rustls package to replace openssl

[Anush008]

We don't have it as a direct dependency though.
Could you please elaborate?

[joshniemela]

If your system doesn't have OpenSSL installed, cargo build will throw an error.
This most likely is happening due to hf-hub or some other dependency that downloads stuff, I was not able to find the cause whilst swiftly looking through the dependencies

[Anush008]

This would need a fix in the upstream projects then.

[joshniemela]

Indeed, from my quick checks it seems it is either hf-hub or some other package which is using it for downloading data from the internet with reqwest or an analogue, these packages already support rustls so it should be possible to make some simple upstream changes.

[mcmah309]

It is being pulled in by fastembed -> hf-hub -> native-tls -> openssl

[mcmah309]

native-tls was removed here huggingface/hf-hub@9d6502f
Resultingly, the current hf-hub does not seem to have a dependency on openssl. So hopefully this issue will resolve when they release the next version.

It may be added back though huggingface/hf-hub#56