I recently tried to use nettle instead of libgcrypt. Now, the configure script asks for another dependency : p11-kit. Note also that I don't know much about cryptography.
I'm building packages for Windows, using mingw-w64 and p11-kit needs another dependency : pthread. I know that pthread-win32 exists for x86 but not for x86_64. In addition, according to wikipedia, PKCS11 API on Windows exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_Application_Programming_Interface.
if that Windows API is not used in gnutls (I don't see anything about it in configure options), I would like to know which problems i could encounter if I disable p11-kit support for gnutls