Hi Daniel,

I loosely followed the libcurl-related discussion on debian-devel. Sorry
to see you being angry with Debian... But don't despair - while some Debian
developers are quick to point out "clean solutions" such as moving to
GnuTLS with its GPL-compatible license, in practice things usually don't
move that fast, and the Debian maintainer of a package will do his best to
ensure that everybody's happy, including the upstream author!

In this case, I think the problems of a OpenSSL->GnuTLS transition were
underestimated. If I get this correctly, due to the complex package
dependencies in Debian, the libcurl+gnutls attempt has resulted in delays
of over a week for Debian packages going from Debian "unstable" to
"testing". This includes new versions of GCC, Gnome and X - which might
help explain some rather heated comments on debian-devel... :)

On Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 02:08:09PM +0200, Daniel Stenberg wrote:
> I'm a bit disturbed by the recent discussions in the Debian devel camp,
> where they seriously are propagating for throwing out the libcurl version
> powered by OpenSSL to replace it with the one powered by GnuTLS. Yes, not
> adding one - they mean replacing it.

As Domenico Andreoli said, this is a long-term goal. I doubt very much
it'll happen anytime soon. It may happen never, since you say that curl may
offer different features when built with OpenSSL/GnuTLS.

> I've tried to point out that there are multiple reasons why removing the
> OpenSSL-based package is bad [*], but I have no cred in their camp and my
> options don't count.

You are mistaken. As the curl upstream author, you'll usually be asked
about such things, and listened to! I can't speak for Domenico, but it
looks like he was under the impression that GnuTLS was a drop-in
replacement for OpenSSL, otherwise he would have discussed the issue first.

> I'm not at all questioning Domenico Andreoli (Debian curl maintainer) on
> this or anything. I firmly believe he does an outstanding work as the
> Debian curl package probably is the best maintained curl package of all
> Linux distributions. This seems more like what other Debian developers
> and maintainers think and impose.

Domenico "owns" the Debian libcurl package. As its maintainer, he has the
authority to decide things like this. If you work together with him, you
can definitely influence what happens to the package.

Cheers,

  Richard
  (also a Debian developer)

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