gnupg-2.1.17 feedback: list of successes

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

I've now completed 155 build attempts for gnupg-2.1.17 in our test lab
on 125+ flavors of Unix(-like) systems.  All of those systems are kept
up-to-date with vendor/distribution software updates, and they
represent a broad swath of systems likely to be encountered at
end-user sites around the planet.

I can report successful validations and installations on these systems
(all x86-64 CPUs):

	Debian 8 (testing)
	Debian 8 (unstable)
	DragonFlyBSD 4.4
	DragonFlyBSD 4.6
	DragonFlyBSD 4.6.1
	Fedora Rawhide (bleeding edge)
	FreeBSD 11
	FreeBSD 12
	NetBSD 7.0
	NetBSD 7.0.2
	TrueOS (FreeBSD 12 relative)
	Ubuntu 16.10
	Ubuntu rolling release (bleeding edge)

That is a success rate of just 10%.

I recorded two test failures on the systems where I installed
gnupg-2.1.17:

	DragonFlyBSD 4.6:	FAIL: gpgtar.scm

	NetBSD 7.0.2:		FAIL: quick-key-manipulation.scm

On the latest DragonFlyBSD 4.7, the build completed, but there were 52
FAIL reports, so I did not install it.

It is disappointing to me that GnuPG 2.1.x development requires
extremely recent versions of the assuan, gcrypt, gpg-error, ksba, and
npth libraries. Even the current most-recent STABLE versions of
CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Red Hat, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, and Ubuntu do
not have sufficiently new library versions from that list to allow
gnupg-2.1.17 to be built on them, unless I go to the extra effort of
attempting to install the latest versions of those libraries (which
would mean more than 625 builds for my lab).

I did, however, build and install npth-1.3 everywhere, replacing
earlier 1.1 versions on the lab systems.  That, at least, went
smoothly, except that for most BSD-family systems, I had to manually
restart the builds with

	make LIBS=-lpthread all check

because the npth-1.3 configure script apparently did not figure out
that -lpthread was needed on those systems.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------