[Pkg-gnupg-maint] Bug#545275: priority important package depending on optional one.

[David Shaw]

On Sep 6, 2009, at 3:47 AM, Andreas Metzler wrote:

> #2 Get rid of gnupg's dependency on libcurl3-gnutls. This seems to
> require quite a bit of effort. If gnupg is built with curl support it
> is using curl even for hkp keyservers. You could perhapsr build gnupg
> twice (once to get a gpgkeys_hkp without curl and then a second time
> for gpgkeys_curl), but I have no idea whether this might actually
> produce working binaries or a subtly broken configuration, it is not
> something supported upstream.

I can't speak to whether you want to do this or not for Debian  
reasons, but at least from the GnuPG perspective, this should work  
fine.  GnuPG itself has very little knowledge of the internals of the  
keyserver helpers, and will happily communicate with any executable  
that speaks the keyserver protocol.

The main difference you will see between a curl gpgkeys_hkp and the  
non-curl gpgkeys_hkp is that hkps (i.e. hkp over SSL) only exists in  
the curl build.

> The third posibilty is to stop linking against curl again, reopening
> LP: #62864 and putting the decision off until upstream implents this
> plan:
> NEWS:
> |Noteworthy changes in version 1.4.3 (2006-04-03)
> [...]
> | To force building the old pre-cURL keyserver helpers, use the
> | configure option --enable-old-keyserver-helpers. [...]  Note also  
> that
> | a future version of GnuPG will remove the old keyserver helpers
> | altogether.

The old helpers were effectively removed in 1.4.6, but this doesn't  
mean we cannot build without curl.  Instead, there is a thin "curl  
shim" that allows building the curl keyserver helpers without curl.

David