Re: GnuTLS for W32

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > For this reason, I think we should give Emacs users an option to put
 > the downloaded DLL in some directory that is not Emacs-specific, so
 > that other programs could use it.

Well, as you know I'm not a Windows person, but my understanding is
that one reason that DLL hell is called "DLL hell" is that programs
install their own versions of DLLs *in the system directories* that
for one reason or another are inappropriate for other programs.  So in
fact you're asking a lot of knowledge on the user's part to get this
right.

This is not unknown on other OSes.  For example, on most GNU/Linux
systems glibc will depend on a specific version of the kernel headers,
which may or may not correspond to the kernel actually running on the
system.  So glibc has its private version of the kernel headers, which
it then imposes on the whole system.  This actually seems to work
pretty well, but only because everybody knows that the most important
thing is for libc to work!  gnutls isn't going to have that priority.

I think that the thing to do is for Emacs to install private versions
of DLLs when it installs any at all, and if/when people complain about
"bloat", add some logic (maybe in the installer routine) to check to
see if there is an appropriate DLL already on the Windows DLL path.
(Yes, I understand that implementing this isn't going to be all that
simple either, but in principle I don't think Emacs should add to DLL
hell.)