Re: GnuTLS for W32

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:21:49 +0100 Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden> wrote: 

ÓF> Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> writes:
ÓF> Sharing the gnutls dll is so wrong at some many levels that I wont
ÓF> start discussing it.
>> 
>> I am puzzled by this.  Why is it wrong to share the GnuTLS DLL?

ÓF> This is a common scenario on MS Windows: multiple providers of binary
ÓF> packages, multiple installers with different install policies even for
ÓF> the same installer, lots of directories on PATH (each application lives
ÓF> on its own directory and often wants to be listed on PATH), varying
ÓF> policies about where a non-privileged user is allowed to put binaries,
ÓF> multiple incompatible binary macropackages that provides the same
ÓF> executables and libraries with the same names (Cygwin, MSYS, GnuWin32
ÓF> and what-not), a lack of culture of system administration, a growing
ÓF> tendency to rely on self-updating packages... and the list goes on.

OK, thanks for explaining.  I'm not convinced it's *better for the user*
that we use ELPA to deliver the DLL, but it seems like a pain to make a
non-Emacs solution work reliably, so we're better off making our
solution only for Emacs.  How unfortunate.

ÓF> For a Windows binary package to be robust, it must be as self-contained
ÓF> as possible. Quality-wise, one of the best decisions I ever made was to
ÓF> distribute the C/C++ MS runtime dlls along with the rest of my binaries,
ÓF> no matter they are already installed on virtually all MS Windows
ÓF> machines. Certain long-standing, very nasty bugs simply went away.

I see.  So, assuming we agree on the ELPA package approach, maybe we
should ship W32 Emacs with a gnutls-w32 package and the DLL and all the
load paths set up already, so it can self-update and it works by
default.

Ted