Subject: Re: [bug#32530] [PATCH] gnu: octave: Fix CA certificate use.

From: Kei Kebreau <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2018 14:03:20 -0400

[email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Marius Bakke <[email-masked]> skribis:
>
>> [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
>
> [...]
>
>>>> Adding this native-search-path to the "octave" package should be
>>>> sufficient.
>>>
>>> I think we should avoid doing this though, because conceptually
>>> CURLOPT_CAPATH “belongs” to cURL, not to Octave.
>>
>> Conceptually maybe, but to my knowledge libcurl itself does not support
>> run-time search paths (due to thread safety concerns IIRC).
>>
>> This search path does seem to be Octave specific.  From the ChangeLog:
>>
>> 2018-04-18  John W. Eaton  <[email-masked]>
>>
>>         allow users to set path to CA certificates for cURL
>>
>>         * url-transfer.cc (curl_transfer::curl_transfer): Check for
>>         CURLOPT_CAINFO and CURLOPT_CAPATH environment variables.  If set, use
>>         them to set the corresponding options for the cURL library.
>>
>>         Files: liboctave/util/url-transfer.cc
>
> Oh, I stand corrected!  Then the patch LGTM, maybe with a comment saying
> that those variables are actually Octave-specific.  :-)
>
> Thank you!
>
> Ludo’.

Is it really Octave-specific? It's defined in the libcurl API [0], so
other software could make use of the variable.

[0]: https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/CURLOPT_CAPATH.html