Re: How to ship native modules?

[Elias Mårtenson]

On 21 February 2017 at 11:41, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:

 

> However, there is an upside. Most people who need this feature are in corporate environments, usually on
> Windows (Kerberos is the standard authentication mechanism in Active Directory) and the runtime libraries
> are a standard part of Windows, so at on that platform there is no issue.

Really?  I was under the impression that one would need to install the
Kerberos libraries from http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/dist/, and then
have the GSSAPI library built for Windows.  These all don't seem to be
available out of the box on MS-Windows.  Am I missing something?

Yes, I was a bit hasty. If you want to use the standard C API, then you need those libraries. However, you could use the Windows API, SSPI instead. It implements the same functionality using a different API (because of course they do).

Note that I don't have any intention of implementing SSPI support myself, but implementing an SSPI backend would not be terribly difficult.

 

I think that making package.el be able to compile programs in
languages like C is an ambitious goal that is best left to end users
at this stage.  For simple enough modules, the Makefile can be made
small and portable, so IMO it isn't worth the complexity to do more
than that, at least not yet.

Fair enough.

That leave me with only one question: With the main user of this functionality being Gnus, should GSS support be implemented as part of Emacs proper, or shipped using ELPA?

The pros and cons of each approach should be well understood now, and I'm willing to implement it either way. So we're up to a policy decision on the part of the Emacs maintainers now.

Regards,

Elias