Re: gnus/starttls.el and net/tls.el

[Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>]

(I'm cc'ing emacs-devel since there appears to be other threads
discussing this already.)

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> Can you tell me how these two files relate to each other?

They both create a TLS encrypted network socket using external tools,
but there is some differences:

tls.el starts talking TLS to the server directly.  starttls.el, however,
does not begin talking TLS until the application calls
starttls-negotiate.  In other words, starttls.el allows an unencrypted
phase before the encrypted phase starts.

tls.el can use openssl and gnutls.  starttls.el can use gnutls and a
tool called 'starttls'.

They serve (slightly) different purposes, but there is some code
duplication.  They probably should be merged eventually, but it requires
some effort (especially testing on many operating systems) and I'm
afraid I don't have time to work on it.

/Simon