Re: GnuTLS for W32

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:00:15 -0500
> 
> The mechanism is not too important from a UI perspective, as long as it
> DTRT, and I don't know the W32 platform well enough to specify how it
> should operate.  If you think replacing the DLL is possible entirely
> from within Emacs, I'm OK with that.

Anything's possible: this is software, after all.  It is just that it
takes a non-trivial effort.

> As a first cut, could we have a gnutls-w32 package, version 3.09
> currently, which when activated will download and install the 3.09
> GnuTLS DLL if it's missing?

We can, if someone does the job.

> Where should this DLL be written?

To the directory where emacs.exe lives.

> Does W32 have APIs or mechanisms to update DLLs safely?

If it does, I'm not familiar with them (which doesn't mean they don't
exist; I don't consider myself an expert on the gazillion APIs
scattered across MS-Windows-land).

> As an alternate solution, could GnuTLS itself have an installer and an
> updater?

Alternative for what? for package.el or for replacing a DLL without
restarting Emacs?

> On W32 this is a worse problem than anywhere else IIUC (Mac OS X has
> MacPorts and GNU/Linux has a billion package managers).  So, we either
> tell the user to download and unzip the GnuTLS DLLs every time there's a
> critical fix, or we do it automatically for them from the package.el UI,
> or we pass the responsibility to the GnuTLS developers to write an
> updater.  I don't think we have the option, as responsible developers,
> of just ignoring that responsibility.

I don't ignore it, I built the W32 DLL in the first place, remember?
I just think this puts us 99% of the way to the goal, that's all.  But
if someone has motivation to go the extra 1%, my hat.