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Significantly retouch the OpenSSL vs. GNUTLS tractate.

This commit is contained in:
Petr Baudis 2005-09-17 04:01:08 +02:00 committed by Petr Baudis
parent 5f05336170
commit 744a87cea2

36
INSTALL
View File

@ -120,20 +120,28 @@ decompression of gzipped files or HTML code rewriting for ELinks-unfriendly
websites.
!BEWARE! If you _distribute_ a binary of ELinks with OpenSSL linked to it,
and the OpenSSL library is not part of your base system, you are VIOLATING THE
GPL (although I believe that for this absurd case no ELinks copyright holder
will sue you, and it's not a problem for the OpenSSL people as well, as they
have explicitly told me). So, people who are making ELinks binaries for systems
with no OpenSSL in the base system and who decided to link OpenSSL against the
ELinks binary may wish NOT to publish or distribute such a binary, as it's
breaking GPL 2(b), if they like to have everything legally perfect (like Debian
people ;). As a semi-solution to this for those people, GNUTLS support was
introduced; if you want to distribute ELinks binaries with HTTPS support,
compile ELinks with the --with-gnutls configure option (assuming that you have
GNUTLS 0.5.0 or later [tested with 0.5.4] installed). However, as GNUTLS is not
yet 100% stable and its support in ELinks is not so well tested yet, it's
recommended for users to give a strong preference to OpenSSL whenever possible.
!BEWARE! If you _distribute_ an ELinks executable linked with OpenSSL and
the OpenSSL library is not part of your base system, you are VIOLATING THE GPL.
I honestly believe that for this absurd case no ELinks copyright holder will
sue you, and it's not a problem for the OpenSSL people as well, as they have
explicitly told me, but you might stay on the safe side.
So, people who are making ELinks binaries for systems with no OpenSSL in the
base system and who decided to link OpenSSL against the ELinks binary may wish
NOT to publish or distribute such an executable, as it's breaking GPL 2(b), if
they like to have everything legally perfect (like the Debian people ;-).
As a semi-solution to this problem, GNUTLS support was introduced; if you want
to distribute ELinks executables with HTTPS support, compile ELinks with the
--with-gnutls configure option (assuming that you have GNUTLS 1.2.0 installed;
we can't say about later versions since GNUTLS people seem to have strange taste
wrt. backwards compatibility).
HOWEVER, beware that GNUTLS support in ELinks is not so well tested as
OpenSSL, and shall be probably still considered experimental. Therfore, it's
recommended to the users to give OpenSSL strong preference whenever possible.
(Just to show the GNU ideologists how silly can they sometimes be, if not
anything else. ;-)
##########