Re: purpose of GnuTLS versions

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Jack,

Jack Hill <jackhill@jackhill.us> skribis:

> We currently have two versions of GnuTLS packaged: 3.7.2 represented
> by the `gnutls` variable and 3.7.7 represented by the `gnutls-latest`
> variable. `guix refresh -l` reports that changes to the 3.7.2 version
> would cause 14770 rebuilds, but only 30 rebuilds for the 3.7.7
> version. As far as I can tell, neither version currently has a
> replacement (graft).

‘gnutls-latest’ was initially added to provide up-to-date Guile
bindings, since Guile bindings were part of GnuTLS.

Since a couple of months ago, Guile bindings live in a separate repo,
but the new ‘guile-gnutls’ package depends on ‘gnutls-latest’, which no
longer depends on Guile (whereas ‘gnutls’ still depends on Guile).

> It seems to me that the `gnutls` variable should refer to the latest
> "stable" release, and the `gnutls-latest` variable to latest "next"
> release. Does that make sense? What am I missing?

As Simon pointed out, that’s for ‘core-updates’.

> It appears that 3.7.2 has some unpatched advisories [2].

Ouch, then we probably need a ‘replacement’.  Would you like to give it
a try?

Thanks for the heads-up!

Ludo’.