Re: Emacs core TLS support

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:59:27 -0600 Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> wrote: 

TZ> On Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:38:44 -0600 Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> wrote: 
TZ> On Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:44:13 -0500 Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> wrote: 
>>>> Simon Josefsson already put a patch together at
>>>> http://josefsson.org/securemacs but it will probably need to be revised
>>>> a bit, the last change was in 2002.  It offers gnutls.el as an
>>>> alternative to starttls.el, with a similar API.  As long as this is
>>>> optional and autodetected through configure, I don't see a downside.  It
>>>> may need to be folded into starttls.el but that's not a big deal.  I'm
>>>> cc-ing Simon in case he has any comments.

SM> I think I'd be OK with adding a --with-gnutls configure option that
SM> links Emacs against that library.  Especially if we can provide
SM> a compatibility footls.el library that works both --with-gnutls
SM> and without.

TZ> Is anyone interested in reviewing Simon's patch?  I think it does
TZ> exactly what you suggest except the compatibility layer, which should be
TZ> trivial since Simon kept the invocation semantics the same between
TZ> gnutls.el and starttls.el.

I posted a revised version of the patch on the gnutls-devel mailing
list and asked for help there:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.gpg.gnutls.devel/4430

(note there's a minor revision of the patch posted today at
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.gpg.gnutls.devel/4442)

Simon Josefsson is active on that list but doesn't seem interested in
further supporting that patch.  So it's up to the Emacs developers to
take this on.

The patch is far from done but at least all the wrapper code is written
and it has no issues AFAIK.  All that remains is for someone with good C
knowledge to look through process.c and process.h and adjust the API
calls appropriately.  Unfortunately I haven't done C in a long time and
don't know the Emacs internals well, so it's really inefficient for me
to dig through it.

I'm attaching the latest patch here for completeness.

Ted

tls.patch
Description: Text Data