Re: GnuTLS for W32

[Juanma Barranquero]

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 00:00, Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden> wrote:

> It took me
> months to discover the problem for one of the users: a mass storage
> device driver and accompanying backup utility installed their own
> custom-modified MSVCRT.DLL on system32, which somehow caused my app to
> freeze when certain gui action was performed. They didn't bothered to
> use a different version string or id on the resources of the library, so
> it reported itself as one of the "good" dlls.

That just means that someone should be hit in the head with a printed
copy of the full MSDN site. Repeatedly.

> Then I started to put my
> runtime dlls on the same directory as the rest of my binaries, and the
> problems of those users disappeared.

Wonderful. But GnuTLS is not "our" runtime DLL, not more than msvcrt.dll is.

Please understand: I'm not really arguing against installing the
GnuTLS DLL along the emacs.exe binary (though, as a separate project,
I still think it's better to install it on its own). I'm arguing
against, and will continue to fight, *distributing* it in the first
place with Emacs. We *are* *not* a binary distribution project, and we
only do it for Windows because most Windows users do not have a
building environment. Going that route means less programming
resources and more administrivia.

> I think that's more or less what Lennart is already doing, isn't it?

Sort of. IMHO, Lennart's EmacsW32 is a fork, because he includes some
changes that aren't just customizations (emacsclient is a prime
example).

> OTOH an installer that could act as an update tool for the dlls could be
> interesting.

Yes, definitely. As long as developing it and maintaining it is
anybody else's (= "not the Emacs w32 people") responsibility :-)

    Juanma