[gnutls-dev] Integrating Guile bindings?

[Simon Josefsson]

ludovic.courtes at laas.fr (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Hi,
>
> Would there be interest in integrating Guile bindings with GnuTLS
> itself, i.e., distributing them with core GnuTLS?
>
> The main advantage I can see (as a Guile user) is that it would allow
> them to be deployed faster and become more widely available.  The main
> drawback is that it adds up to the maintenance burden of the GnuTLS
> maintainer(s), and I would perfectly understand reluctance to add more
> code to the repository.
>
> Technically, we could arrange so that this burden is limited.  For
> instance, the easiest solution would be to drop the `guile-gnutls' tree
> in a sub-directory of the GnuTLS source, and then use
> `AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS'.  With such an approach, the Guile bindings could
> even be maintained off-tree and periodically copied to the GnuTLS
> repository.
>
> Building the Guile bindings could also be disabled if either Guile is
> not found or `--enable-guile-bindings' was not explicitly passed at
> configure-time, so that users who don't care about Guile don't notice
> the difference.
>
> What do you think?

Hi!  I don't have a strong opinion.  I believe that if guile-gnutls
would ever cause a ./configure && make of GnuTLS itself to fail, I'd be
rather inclined to disable it, though.  However, good configure.ac code
would be able to disable the build if it cannot be installed, and not
cause any problems.

I'm somewhat concerned about the size of the GnuTLS distribution
archive, and would rather want to modularize things (i.e., remove the
libtasn1 + opencdk copies) than include even more stuff.  But I'm not
sure this is really a valid concern.  It is still small compared to
OpenOffice...

Another concern is build-time.  Building GnuTLS from a fresh CVS is what
I often do to test things, and even today that is slower than I would
like.  (I'm not on slow hardware!)  Would I have to build the guile
stuff in order to do 'make dist'?  If there are any files in the
*.tar.gz which is generated during build in the guile/ directory,
guile-gnutls would need to be built as well.

Perhaps others could chime in... It would be interesting to know what
various GNU/Linux distributors think about this.

/Simon