Re: gnutls for win32

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>
> 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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

> 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...)

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

TIA