Re: GnuTLS/TLS proposals for after the release

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Wed, 06 Jul 2016 08:21:44 -0400 Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> wrote: 

TZ> On Tue, 05 Jul 2016 17:32:59 -0700 John Wiegley <address@hidden> wrote: 
>>>>>>> Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> writes:
>>> Here are some thoughts about the near future of gnutls.el and friends (none
>>> urgently needed for the release):

JW> Ted, can you, or someone with more experience in this area, help me to
JW> understand these alternatives? If we are all generally agreed on one over 
the
JW> others, I'm willing to go with the wisdom of consensus.

TZ> These are three separate proposals, not alternatives of each other.

TZ> They have different purposes: (1) is to make tls.el, which uses
TZ> command-line tunnels, more noisy by default, so users are led to the C
TZ> bindings to GnuTLS (gnutls.el). (2) is to disable SSLv3 in tls.el. (3)
TZ> is to change the variables in gnutls.el a bit to make customization and
TZ> future work easier. (3) is the only risky one because it affects user
TZ> customizations, but I think we have to bite that buller sooner or later.

TZ> There are several people who have worked in this area besides me, mainly
TZ> Lars and Paul Eggert I think. I asked Lars about (3) already but haven't
TZ> heard back. Any comments are welcome, of course.

In support of (1) and (2), see
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/200356 (thread:
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.bugs.general/1203642 )
where Lars and Kurt discussed the dangerously outdated state of
s_client invocation strings. So some work in that direction has already
been done; I'm just proposing to continue it.

Ted