On Fri, Nov 26 2010, Ted Zlatanov wrote:

> 2.10.x and above let us set a callback function, which would make all of
> the above easier and more convenient from ELisp-land.  The problem is
> that 2.10.x hasn't been widely adopted in Debian and thus won't work by
> default.

It's in experimental. It won't go in sid until squeeze is released,
which should be very soon now. So there's nothing to wait IMHO.
At the time Emacs 24 will be released, gnutls 2.10 would have been
since a very long in Debian. :)

> This is essentially why I haven't worked on the GnuTLS support in a bit:
> I don't know the best way forward.  If anyone can suggest a good way to
> do it, I'm all ears.  I also don't know about 2.10.x's status in the
> major distros and whether Emacs can require that version or higher
> specifically.

My opinion is go with 2.10.

Some distro do not update often packages if they're is no urgent need
to, anyhow. So you will just be pushing them a bit, which is not a bad
thing. :)

Gentoo, OpenBSD, FreeBSD already have it FWIW. And Debian in
experimental, so it will end up in Debian and Ubuntu in a couple of
month top[1].

This is the development model I used for the last years in various
project like the awesome window manager, often requiring recent version
of libraries it uses. I consider I don't have enough time to write
compatibility code for older library release, while smart people write
better interface for us to use.
The only downside is for people using old OS for whatever reason. But
they *will have* to upgrade other time anyhow, so why not doing sooner
than later? Since we're talking a user program (not a production Web
server), there's no big counter-argument to this, IMHO.

Of course, YMMV, as your amount of spare time to be used writing
compatibility code. ;)

[1]  Depends if squeeze is released soon, of course.

-- 
Julien Danjou
// ᐰ <julien@danjou.info>   http://julien.danjou.info