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+This document lists some of the known bugs:
+
+* Due to compatibility issues with RedHat's gcc 2.96 compiler, std::vector
+  accesses are done using [] instead of at(). This is generally OK (we are only
+  *supposed* to read valid indexes), but at times bugs have caused it so that
+  an invalid index is accessed, which is either not noticed until later, or
+  causes a SIGSEGV on the spot.
+
+  Other GCC related problems: we can't use std::is* or std::to* because GCC pre
+  3.0 (including RedHat's 2.96) barfs on it. And std::string is missing the
+  clear() function (this is not a real problem, just an annoyance).
+
+  There are various other problems related to linkage, std::multimap handling,
+  and so forth that I won't bother getting into here.
+
+  Currently there are a fairly large number of workarounds for GCC 2.x. Botan
+  1.4.x will be the last stable series that supports this compiler; all said
+  workarounds will be removed in 1.5.0 (and stable trees past 1.4.x). As of now
+  (June 2004) almost all operating systems that have used 2.95.x or 2.96 in the
+  past (most Linux distros, MacOS X 10.1, NetBSD 1.6, FreeBSD 4, QNX 6.2) have
+  been replaced by newer versions that use a more modern GCC.
+
+* In some of the nastier cases (like indefinite length constructions), the BER
+  decoder will use small integer multiples the total size of the object. In the
+  usual case of something being a few tens/100s of kilobytes at most, this is
+  not a big deal, but reading in a 50 meg BER file could be very costly in some
+  cases.
+
+* Several places assume ASCII characters. However as of 1.3.5 this is (or
+  should be) contained to charset.cpp; everything else should be character set
+  independent. The version as shipped assumes ASCII/Latin-1, and modifications
+  would be needed to use it on EBCDIC systems.
+
+  I suspect there are other cases I'm not thinking of, and it's likely that
+  EBCDIC will need a significant amount of debugging (and thought) to work
+  correctly.
+
+* T61 strings are treated like ISO 8859-1 strings, even though this is
+  technically incorrect. Since everyone else does this too, it shouldn't be a
+  problem.
+
+* X509_Time::X509_Time(u64bit) is not thread safe (it uses gmtime).
+  Unfortunately we can't really rely on gmtime_r being available. The window
+  of contention is minimal (we copy the return value into a buffer allocated on
+  the stack) but it is there. If you're very paranoid about this, edit the
+  get_tm function in asn1_tm.cpp to use gmtime_r
+
+* There are various low-level threading issues, but mostly in places where a
+  threaded program should not be touching things (set_mutex_type, for example).
+  The list of such unsafe functions should be documented.