I did see potential support for a hard-coded CA path for NSS, but as autotools did not enable it either, I did not bother. I also did not have the required libnsspem.so library on Arch Linux for testing.

If everything is OK, I plan to have this merged after a Travis CI patch.

I did see potential support for a hard-coded CA path for NSS, but as autotools did not enable it either, I did not bother.

The autoconf-produced configure script supports --with-nss --with-ca-bundle=... but the current recommendation is not to use it.

I also did not have the required libnsspem.so library on Arch Linux for testing.

Yes, that is not going to improve I am afraid.

If everything is OK, I plan to have this merged after a Travis CI patch.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Thanks!

The autoconf-produced configure script supports --with-nss --with-ca-bundle=... but the current recommendation is not to use it.

The default autotools config appears to set the CA bundle which will fail by default on Arch Linux when built with NSS:

$ src/curl https://example.com -vso /dev/null
*   Trying 93.184.216.34:443...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to example.com (93.184.216.34) port 443 (#0)
* Initializing NSS with certpath: none
* WARNING: failed to load NSS PEM library libnsspem.so. Using OpenSSL PEM certificates will not work.
*   CAfile: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
  CApath: none
* Closing connection 0

With the following change relative to my previous patch, the CMake build will be "bug-compatible" with autotools:

diff --git a/CMakeLists.txt b/CMakeLists.txt
index 8d696dfa5..e9727d77a 100644
--- a/CMakeLists.txt
+++ b/CMakeLists.txt
@@ -678,5 +678,5 @@ set(CURL_CA_PATH "auto" CACHE STRING
 if("${CURL_CA_BUNDLE}" STREQUAL "")
   message(FATAL_ERROR "Invalid value of CURL_CA_BUNDLE. Use 'none', 'auto' or file path.")
-elseif("${CURL_CA_BUNDLE}" STREQUAL "none" OR USE_NSS)
+elseif("${CURL_CA_BUNDLE}" STREQUAL "none")
   unset(CURL_CA_BUNDLE CACHE)
 elseif("${CURL_CA_BUNDLE}" STREQUAL "auto")
@@ -689,9 +689,11 @@ endif()
 if("${CURL_CA_PATH}" STREQUAL "")
   message(FATAL_ERROR "Invalid value of CURL_CA_PATH. Use 'none', 'auto' or directory path.")
-elseif("${CURL_CA_PATH}" STREQUAL "none" OR USE_NSS)
+elseif("${CURL_CA_PATH}" STREQUAL "none")
   unset(CURL_CA_PATH CACHE)
 elseif("${CURL_CA_PATH}" STREQUAL "auto")
   unset(CURL_CA_PATH CACHE)
-  set(CURL_CA_PATH_AUTODETECT TRUE)
+  if(NOT USE_NSS)
+    set(CURL_CA_PATH_AUTODETECT TRUE)
+  endif()
 else()
   set(CURL_CA_PATH_SET TRUE)

Changing the default CA bundle is potentially for a future patch, as workaround one can use curl --cacert "" or set cmake -DCURL_CA_BUNDLE=none.

I'll push the revised patch, feel free to merge it if you are happy.

No worries, I was already happy with the previous patch. We do not need to be bug-compatible with autotools. Just wanted to record my experiments with this pull request. Having a working default on distros without nss-pem makes perfect sense.

The default autotools config appears to set the CA bundle which will fail by default on Arch Linux

The configure script doesn't figure out if libnsspem.so is present and working, it just picks a default. Without that PEM-library supported by NSS, I suppose you want to run configure with --without-ca-path.

I think consistency between autotools and CMake is good, hence my previous change. NSS is not a common option, I think that the --without-capath is a good workaround for now. Maybe I'll revisit it in the future when I resume experimentation :-)

I'll push this, last day of the freeze!