Re: url-retrieve-synchronously randomly fails on https URLs (patch included)

[Richard Stallman]

    Unless I got it all wrong, this is much more complicated than the
    original three-liner; I wonder if it is worth going this way instead of
    a very simple patch that could still be buggy on rare occasions.

It is a bad thing for software to be unreliable.  We should write it
so that it works every time, not just 99.9% of the time.

It is worth paying this small complexity to make it work right.
Besides, the code can be simpler.

    +          ;; advance point to after all informational messages that
    +          ;; `openssl s_client' and `gnutls' print
    +          (lexical-let ((attempts tls-end-of-info-match-attempts)
    +                        (start-of-data nil))

Why not ordinary let?

    +                    (not (= 0 (if (> attempts 0) (decf attempts) -1)))

I think there should not be a limit -- it should just keep looping
until it finds what it is looking for.

    +              (unless (accept-process-output process 1)
    +                (sit-for 1)))

I think there is no need for sit-for.  accept-process-output will wait.

    +              (warn
    +               "`open-tls-stream': Could not match `tls-end-of-info'
    regexp in %d attempts."
    +               tls-end-of-info-match-attempts)))

If you get rid of the counter, you won't need this either.