Re: gnutls for win32

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:05:43 +0200 Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote: 

>> From: Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden>
>> Date: Sun, 01 Jan 2012 11:38:33 -0500
>> 
>> I meant: do you want to work with Christoph to incorporate building
>> GnuTLS into building Emacs itself?

EZ> I don't think this is practical.  GnuTLS is a very large project (as
EZ> you know only too well), building it requires quite a few other
EZ> packages (that are its dependencies), and doing so on Windows requires
EZ> to have MSYS and many supporting tools installed, in addition and
EZ> alongside the MinGW setup.  Asking people who build Emacs to have all
EZ> that is way too much, IMO.

EZ> On top of that, the Windows build of GnuTLS is not a fire-and-forget
EZ> thing, due to various problems I won't go into here.  E.g., the
EZ> default static+dynamic build simply fails on Windows.

OK.

>> Yes, I mean we want to make the installation easier, that's all.  Right
>> now they have to get the GnuTLS binaries separately.

EZ> I think downloading a single zip archive and unzipping it is much
EZ> easier than adding GnuTLS to Emacs.

For every Emacs user?  That seems like a pain.  Can we include it in the
binaries Christoph is putting out, even if it's not built with Emacs
itself?

>> OK.  In that case, we should build some tests of the GnuTLS
>> functionality in Emacs so upgrading is easier and less stressful.

EZ> That would be good, yes.  In particular, it would allow people who
EZ> don't normally use GnuTLS related features in Emacs to reliably
EZ> produce tested binaries.

OK.  Since Emacs won't include the GnuTLS DLLs on Windows, and even if
it did it doesn't have the GnuTLS server functionality, this will
require some extra work.  It should probably hit Savannah.

>> I can keep track of the GnuTLS releases and bump the Emacs support
>> when we agree it's worthwhile.  (You or anyone else can volunteer to
>> do this if you want that role...)

EZ> It should be enough to post a message saying that you recommend
EZ> upgrading for this-and-that reason.

OK.

Ted