Re: url library and GnuTLS, and Emacs-issued certificates

[Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

>> we should merge net/tls.el and gnus/starttls.el; those two packages
>> appear to be duplicates.
>
> Well, they aren't duplicates per se.  tls.el does straight up TLS, while
> starttls.el does STARTTLS.  The way starttls.el interfaces with the
> external programs is pretty hairy (doing some unencrypted traffic, then
> sending a signal to the program, and then doing encrypted traffic), and
> probably deserves its own elisp file, I think.

Could you explain in more detail?  What I see is this:

;;; tls.el --- TLS/SSL support via wrapper around GnuTLS
...
;; This package implements a simple wrapper around "gnutls-cli" to
;; make Emacs support TLS/SSL.
...
(defun open-tls-stream (name buffer host port)
  "Open a TLS connection for a port to a host.
Returns a subprocess-object to represent the connection.
..


;;; starttls.el --- STARTTLS functions
...
;; This file now contains a combination of the two previous
;; implementations both called "starttls.el".  The first one is Daiki
;; Ueno's starttls.el which uses his own "starttls" command line tool,
;; and the second one is Simon Josefsson's starttls.el which uses
;; "gnutls-cli" from GNUTLS.
...
(defun starttls-open-stream (name buffer host port)
  "Open a TLS connection for a port to a host.
Returns a subprocess object to represent the connection.
...


Both use the gnutls-cli command tool (though starttls.el apparently
supports starttls too), and both implement a wrapper around
open-network-stream.  "Unnecessary duplication" is surely the natural
reaction...