Hello Ted,
Sorry, I saw the message but didn't get a chance to act on it. Writing a joking remark on a mobile phone takes much less time and effort...
Anyway,
T> Perhaps there can be a way to say
T> "if this %t is empty, remove the preceding --argument as well"
T> in the format string? That would simplify the whole thing, like so:
T> "gnutls-cli --x509cafile %T -p %p %h"
T> ...becomes "gnutls-cli -p PORT HOST"
T> when the %T parameter is nil. Just an idea...
I toyed with this idea, and even implemented something of the sort, but from a bit different different direction - I added another replacement variable - %c - and made the list tls-program now contain pairs with (string . value-of-c), e.g. ("gnutls-cli %c %T -p %p %h" . "--x509cafile") have both %c and %T replaced (together) as appropriate.
The problem with this approach is, what about people who customized this setting? So, I made it backward compatible with the old standard. Eventually however, it turned into a an ugly big mess due to the backward compatability and I decided against submitting.
There is a similar problem of backward compatibility in your approach - what if someone customized it in such a way that wasn't expecting an argument to be removed, and it would create a vulnerability in their setup? I also don't see a simple way to do it nicely, but have no objections on those grounds, of course.
Finally, I would do the patch but am uncertain whether it would be better to wait for your results from emacs-devel and remove the ssl3 bit as well (or just go ahead and do it). Let me know and I'll send the appropriate patch.
Best,
Kosta
Kosta: ping, I noted some minor needed improvements in my last message,
maybe you missed it... Thanks!
Ted