Re: GnuTLS for W32

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
> Date: Sun, 08 Jan 2012 16:40:34 +0900
> 
> Richard Riley writes:
> 
>  > It was quite clear in the context what was meant by "emacs component" :
>  > a component which contributes to a working and complete emacs
>  > installation.
> 
> In context, I don't disagree with that definition.  I merely deny that
> GnuTLS is needed for a complete Emacs distribution in that sense from
> the point of view of the GNU Emacs project.  I believe that Juanma and
> Eli would agree with me that those two points are the main ones,
> though we respectfully disagree with each other on many other grounds.

I do agree, mainly because the concept of a "working and complete
emacs installation" defined above will lead us to absurdity, whereby
we will need to provide many programs and packages Emacs uses in some
of its features, which on Windows are not available out of the box.
GnuTLS is not different from Grep or Find or Ispell/Aspell or Awk, to
name just a few (and that's even before you consider the tools needed
to build programs from Emacs).

Building these add-ons and providing installers for them must be a job
of a separate group of volunteers, not of the Emacs project.  The job
of the Emacs project is to provide infrastructure for integration with
those add-ons, such as dynamic-library-alist populated with the names
of the supported DLLs and the machinery to load the DLLs on demand.

>  > I dont want to bicker and be petty but felt Ted was getting a bit
>  > of a hard time for merely wanting to make things better for the end
>  > user and, more importantly, the new adopter.
> 
> But this is not petty, it's fundamental!  Proponents who argue that
> distribution of GnuTLS binaries is needed for Windows users are
> ignoring a very important distinction: users (new adopters) of the GNU
> System (and at lower priority, free OSes in general) vs. users of
> non-free OSes and OSes whose attractiveness is based on non-free
> software.  Supporting the former is the policy of GNU Emacs;
> supporting the latter is not (though of course individual developers
> are free to contribute to such support if they like).

That is true, but we don't even distribute GnuTLS for GNU systems, so
talking about doing that for Windows is _really_ far-fetched.