How to ship native modules?

["Elias Mårtenson" <lokedhs@gmail.com>]

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As I am working on making the Gnus-GSS support ready for general
consumption, I need to know how this thing should be distributed.

Right now there are two separate issues, with the second dependent on the
first:

The first issue is that I have no idea how to actually distribute the
native GSSAPI module. It's just a single, reasonably small, C file that
needs to be compiled with the libgssapi_krb5.so library. If this is bundled
in Emacs proper, making it a part of the build system isn't too
complicated, although I don't believe this has been done before.

If it is to be shipped as part of ELPA, then a different question emerges:
Should I simply add code to the Elisp files that checks if it can find the
native library and if not, compile it on the fly? It's doable, but I'd hard
to reinvent several wheels to do so. Essentially I'd have to rebuild part
of autoconf in Elisp.

The second issue is how to ship my changes to Gnus. My changes are limited
to a changes to nnimap.el, but this new feature will now try to require the
‘gss’ feature when gssapi authentication is enabled. If the gssapi library
is shipped as part of ELPA, then we end up with the interesting situation
where the packaged version of Gnus depends on a package in ELPA.

How should I continue with this?

Regards,
Elias

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