Re: Did you say "community"? What's that?!? (Episode 2)

[Marco Maggi]

"Neil Jerram" wrote:
>
>"Marco Maggi" <address@hidden> writes:
> [...] I asked for some  help to complete my
> Guile binding to OpenSSL
>
>Out of interest, what happened with that,

It is somewhat working, I still have some things
to write and some things about certificate management
and session caching to learn/understand.

The OpenSSL documentation is not that good for me
(scattered among many manpages, I have seen working
code on the Net calling functions that are not
documented at all), so the next step for me is to
inspect Ralf Engelschall's mod_ssl to see how he
drives it.

> how does it relate to the TLS bindings that Aaron
> Van Devender (IIRC) was working on over the summer?

Now that you tell me, I too know that this effort exists.
After a quick search I was not able to find any code
on the Net, I will have to search some more (IIRC it
was not announced on the GNU TLS mailing list).

I was planning to try to write a GNU TLS binding, too
(to test myself). But if his works, fine! I will be
happy to make the Guile-OSLO API compatible with the
one of his binding (OSLO because without written
permission it is not allowed to use "OpenSSL" in the
name of a piece of software).

>>   Now I  have written  a binding[1] to  GD[2] (the
>> graphics library  etc.)  which, you  have to admit
>> IS  somewhat funny.
>
>Why is it funny?

Because drawing pictures is more fun than reading BSD
man pages. :)

>> Discussion  can take place on the
>> 'gee-users' mailing list, hosted at GNA!
>
>I think this kind of offer/appeal is implicit in any
>free software project; I'm not sure you have to say
>it explicitly.

I had problems in creating mailing lists at GNA! (like
receiving mail messages saying "your administration
password is:" followed by a blank line, some passwords
are so secret that even the administrator cannot know
them), so, until a few days ago, there was no working
mailing list at all.

>> there  are  many options to be selected.
>
>But perhaps not all of those options need to be
>exposed to the Scheme binding?

For basic FreeType'd text placing gdImageStringFT
is enough and "quick" to code, but there is no
reason to exclude the other functions or arbitrarily
select defaults for some options.

The problem, for me, is that I bet that installing
FreeType requires a recent version of X, which I do not
have. And this means, for me, to upgrade the whole
Debian; I will do it, but not tomorrow.

Ciao

--
Marco Maggi