[gnutls-dev] libgwenhywfar and gnucash

[Thomas Bushnell BSG]

Ok, we need your help, and maybe you guys can help us.

I am the Debian maintainer for gnucash.  gnucash offers a feature to
connect to banks, called HBCI, which for supporting banks, allows you
to download your financials very conveniently.  This is very common in
Germany.

Debian does this with the aqbanking library.  aqbanking uses a
portability library called gwenhywfar to, among other things, deal
with ssl.  gwenhywfar links with openssl.

As we know, openssl is not GPL compatible.  To get around this,
aqbanking and gwenhywfar both contain a special exception to allow
linking with openssl.

But that's not good enough (and this is verified with the GPL
Compliance Lab); *everything* in the gnucash binary which is GPL'd
would need to have that exception.  Needless to say, that's a lot of
gnome, and long-vanished gnucash developers, and other people who
would all need to give permission.  Ain't gonna happen.

The normal thing to do is simply to link the code in question
(gwenhywfar) with gnutls instead of openssl.  Supposedly, gnutls is
advertised as a drop-in replacement for openssl.

But, alas, it ain't.  gwenhywfar uses features of openssl that gnutls
doesn't support.

And this brings me to you all.  Can I hook someone from the gnutls
team up with someone who knows gwenhywfar, so that gnutls can support
what gwenhywfar needs?

Thomas

PS: Please make sure to keep me on any replies; I am not subscribed to
gnutls-dev.