Re: [PATCH] gnu: r-curl: Respect CURL_CA_BUNDLE variable.

[Roel Janssen <roel@gnu.org>]

Ricardo Wurmus writes:

> Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:
>
>> On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 09:24:10PM +0200, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
>>> Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:
>>> 
>>> > On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 11:53:33PM +0200, Roel Janssen wrote:
>>> >> This patch was essential to me being able to interact with HTTPS urls in
>>> >> R.  As far as I understand, by default, R only looks for CURL_CA_BUNDLE
>>> >> on Windows, but with this patch it looks for CURL_CA_BUNDLE on GNU/Linux
>>> >> as well.  Is this correct?
>>> >> 
>>> >> I can confirm it works for me, so I'd like to see this patch pushed.
>>> >
>>> > It's good to hear that it works, but I still think we should run it by
>>> > the upstream maintainers. We are activating C code that they
>>> > specifically decided not to use on GNU / Linux. Why did they do that?
>>> 
>>> The comments in the code indicate that on Windows they try to load the
>>> certs bundle that comes with R for Windows, i.e. in the R HOME’s “etc”
>>> directory.  There is no such file on GNU, so no special handling is
>>> needed.
>>> 
>>> On GNU this is taken care of by libcurl.  It comes with a default path
>>> to the certs bundle, which can be overridden with configure flags
>>> (“--with-ca-bundle” or “--with-ca-path”).  In our Guix package we don’t
>>> do this (yet?), so by default SSL cert validation is broken.
>>> 
>>> libcurl does not respect CURL_CA_BUNDLE; it assumes that the application
>>> will override the CA bundle path if it needs a special path, otherwise
>>> it assumes that the default path is fine (using Guix this is not the
>>> case).
>>> 
>>> The maintainers of the R curl package made the special case for Windows
>>> because it is not needed on GNU systems following the FHS.  The best fix
>>> here would be to patch libcurl such that it checks the CURL_CA_BUNDLE
>>> environment variable invariably, just like the curl command line tool
>>> does.  Until this is done I think we should path packages such as
>>> r-curl to make them usable.  Once we have agreed on a fix to libcurl we
>>> can remove all patches to individual packages using libcurl.
>>
>> That makes sense. Thank you for taking the time to explain.
>
> Sure!  Pushed to master as 8f309571d3847d4bca331061e881fa01d9badb77.

Thanks!