Re: proposal: require GnuTLS 3.1.x (previous stable)

[Michael Welsh Duggan <mwd@md5i.com>]

peder@news.klingenberg.no (Peder O. Klingenberg) writes:

> On Tue, Nov 25 2014 at 18:55, Ivan Shmakov wrote:
>
>> 	Yes, although I’d rather question the necessity of building
>> 	Emacs ‘master’ on an LTS GNU/Linux system.  If the intent is to
>> 	use the last decade’s versions of Libc and Coreutils, – why
>> 	Emacs has to be newer than that?
>
> Because features.  My desktop machine runs Kubuntu 10.04 still, because
> it mostly does what I need without needing my attention all the time, it
> is a stable platform I can use to get work done.
>
> There is no conscious desire to run old software for nostalgias sake,
> more a lack of desire to upgrade willy-nilly with the associated
> breakage-fixing and retraining of muscle memory because some dimwits
> decided to reinvent everything badly.

Moreover, not everyone has complete control over their desktop.  At work
we have RHEL6.  I build Emacs for my own use.  I could build gnutls as
well, but my (recent) experience of that is hellish.  gnutls requires
nettle and gmp.  I build nettle, and then find out that gnutls doesn't
support the latest nettle.  So I grab an older nettle and build that.
Then it complains about HOGWEED.  Oh, libgmp needs to be installed
_before_ nettle is built to get HOGWEED.  I wish that had been
mentioned.  At this point, I give up for the day because I have to get
real work done.

-- 
Michael Welsh Duggan
(md5i@md5i.com)