Re: NaCl support for Emacs (was: GnuTLS for W32)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 09 Jan 2012 09:26:21 -0500
> 
> I'm interested in bringing in support for the NaCl cryptographic library
> for Emacs, after 24.1 is out.  There is info on NaCl here:
> 
> http://nacl.cr.yp.to/index.html

Call me weird or old-fashioned, but that library's build procedure
looks odd, to say the least.

It's as if Make and Autoconf never existed: the entire build is done
by a series of shell scripts, all of them called `do', which have
specific knowledge about several platforms hardcoded into them (do the
developers really intend to maintain all this mess?).

On top of that, the top-level `do' modifies PATH and LD_LIBRAY_PATH
(what?  why??) as it sees fit, and redirects all its output to a log
file, so you basically run blind, like in bad old DOS days (can you
say "tail -f"?).

Also, the scripts run all kinds of non-standard tools and compiler
switches, and although they seem to ignore the resulting errors, how
would J.R. Hacker become confident that the build succeeded and she
can use the results?  E.g., what do you get out of this snippet of the
build log:

  === Tue Jan 10 03:28:17 EST 2012 === checking gcc -m32 -fomit-frame-pointer
  /usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible 
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.4.3/libgcc.a when searching for -lgcc
  /usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible 
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.4.3/libgcc.a when searching for -lgcc
  /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lgcc
  collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

Is it good? is it bad? can I trust the results?

Finally, there's no Makefile anywhere in sight, and no installation
script that I could find.  Bye-bye, "make install-strip", hello manual
installation.

Sorry, but I wouldn't touch such "software" with a 3-mile stick.  Not
for Emacs, anyway.