Re: GNUrl, GNUnet and alpine-linux

[Daniel Golle]

Hi!

On Mon, Feb 13, 2023 at 09:28:35PM +0100, xrs wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> since the last changes on gnunet concerning gnurl/curl detection I have
> a strange behaviour in the context of packaging gnunet for
> alpine-linux. 
> 
> When building gnunet-0.19.3 with gnurl-7.72.0[2] the
> process stops at detecting libcurl. (See also [1].) 
> ...
> checking for conversation feature set to build... none
> checking for curl_easy_getinfo in -lcurl-gnutls... no
> checking for gawk... (cached) awk
> checking for curl-config... no
> checking whether libcurl is usable... no
> ...
> 
> This used to work. 
> 
> Now, when building gnunet-0.19.3 with curl-7.87.0 I get no error in the
> configure phase which is strange, because I expected that gnunet would
> only compile with gnurl or curl-gnutls.
> ...
> checking for conversation feature set to build... none
> checking for curl_easy_getinfo in -lcurl-gnutls... no
> checking for gawk... (cached) awk
> checking for curl-config... /usr/bin/curl-config
> checking for the version of libcurl... 7.87.0
> checking for libcurl >= version 7.34.0... yes
> checking whether libcurl is usable... yes
> checking for curl_free... yes
> checking for curl/curl.h... yes
> checking whether CURLINFO_TLS_SSL_PTR is declared... yes
> checking for library containing __atomic_load_8... -latomic
> ...
> 
> Right now it would be possible to package gnunet with libcurl
> (OpenSSL) on alpine-linux.
> 
> Do I misunderstand something here?

I had the same problem when updating the GNUnet build for OpenWrt.
My conclusion is that gnURL has basically been abandonned as cURL now
offeres a more or less decent way to detect the used TLS library at
runtime and also a stable C API portable accross all TLS backends.

Hence many distributions (now also including OpenWrt[1]) now offer
a package called 'curl-gnutls' which basically builds libcurl with
the settings previously used to build libgnurl and then uses patchelf
to change the soname from 'curl' to 'curl-gnutls'.

Maybe the fact that gnURL is a relict of the past should be officially
announced or at least more prominently stated on the project website?


[1] https://github.com/openwrt/packages/blob/master/net/libcurl-gnutls/Makefile


> 
> Cheers,
> xrs
> 
> [1] https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/xrs/aports/-/jobs/972407#L425
> [2] https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/v3.17/community/x86_64/gnurl
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