[gnutls-dev] Re: libgwenhywfar and gnucash

[Simon Josefsson]

Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb at becket.net> writes:

> Andreas Metzler <ametzler at downhill.at.eu.org> writes:
>
>> On 2006-06-09 Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb at becket.net> wrote:
>>> Simon Josefsson <jas at extundo.com> writes:
>> [...]
>>> > The OpenSSL emulation layer in GnuTLS is quite thin, and I wouldn't
>>> > recommend anyone to use it unless they have a very strong reason to do
>>> > so.  I haven't seen a good reason here yet.
>>
>>> Debian has made extremely heavy use of it, because of the noxious
>>> license on openssl.
>> [...]
>>
>> Are you sure about that? On a quick search I have not found a single
>> major package in Debian using openssl compat. For example openldap2,
>> exim4, cups, samba all do not use the compatibilty layer but the
>> GnuTLS-API.
>
> lynx and ofx are the ones that come up on my system.
>
> I guess that doesn't count as "extremely heavy".  It was the standard
> advice when we became aware of the openssl license problems that
> developers were advised to link against gnutls-openssl instead of
> ssl.  It is good that this is minimally needed.

Right.  And given how some parts of the OpenSSL API tend to change
over time, I think it will be difficult to implement compatibility
layers for all of it.

> The real question is not so much whether we have a compat layer, as
> much as we want gwenhywfar to be usable in GPL'd programs. ;)

Yup.  And using the GnuTLS API directly will achieve that. ;-)

/Simon