Re: gnutls on mingw64

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>
>> Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2019 02:00:09 -0800
>> 
>> >> Currently neither w32_delayed_load nor init_gnutls_functions calls
>> >> GetLastError; would it help to add that?
>> >
>> > Does its value tell something useful in this case?
>> 
>> I did not modify the code to find out, but I'm guessing it's the
>> standard unhelpful "could not find the file" without the file name.
>
> But it did find the file, it just couldn't load it because some of its
> dependencies were of incorrect architecture/ABI.

It found libgnutls-30.dll, which was the top level file it was
looking for. But that depends on libhogweed-5.dll and libnettle-7.dll,
which were not found.

> IMO, it only makes sense to call GetLastError and display the results
> to the user if the message will allow the user figure out what went
> wrong and how to fix it.

Yes.

<rant> I keep hoping Microsoft will do better, but I'm always
disappointed. The most common error I get is "file not found" because
PATH is wrong or the file is not installed, when it's perfectly clear
that the system knows the name of the file it's looking for, but _I_
don't, and it's not telling me! _very_ frustrating; Gnu/Linux is much
better here. So I assume that's the error message GetLastError will
return here. </rant>

I'm also assuming that whoever wrote w32_delayed_load tested calling
GetLastError, got an unhelpful message, and deleted it. It would be nice
if there was a comment saying that. If I get motivated, I might try that
experiment, but given the above, it's not high on my list.

-- 
-- Stephe