Subject: Re: bug#20078: imap with openssl

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2015 10:24:07 -0400

> There's discussion in those threads about whether 'anyone' still uses
> imap.el and its calls to external openssl.  It arises, for example, when
> using mail-sources with, say, nnmbox.

I consider imap.el's use of an external process to be a bug.

> My 'crisis' arose in a sun/solaris system where neither starttls nor gnutls
> is available.  It seems that starttls is now no longer maintained (for
> cause) and, in my case, gnutls is not easy to build from source because of
> recursive library dependencies.

Hmm... we're definitely moving in the direction of requiring libgnutls
when building Emacs.

> Would it make sense for emacs to incorporate gnutls?

No, there be dragons.

> That way one could be sure for a given build of emacs that it would
> work with gnutls.

That would just mean that you wouldn't be able to build Emacs without
first solving the "recursive library dependencies".

But yes, I encourage you to try and solve these gnutls build problems,

        Stefan