[OS X Emacs] Verifying Aquamacs

[John Wroclawski]

> On Apr 21, 2020, at 1:15 PM, Bill Rising <brising at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> I get the same behavior when checking for updates (just a message 'Mark set'), when using Aquamacs 3.5 under Catalina 10.5.4. BUT I've not had any problems with verifying Aquamacs, so the two behaviors are likely independent of one another.

FWIW, I was just writing a similar comment. These are two essentially unrelated functions, that are doing two completely unrelated things. The only possible couplings I can imagine are

1) a failure of network connectivity that prevents both of them from working. (Note that the “check for update” function presumably always needs connectivity, but the “verify” function doesn’t if it doesn’t need to check for developer certificate validity or revocation)

2) some sort of strange behavior (aka “bug”) in the macOS certificate validation code that’s causing valid, or validatable, certificates to fail to validate. 

As wild speculation, Arthur’s report that he was getting a validation error for an apparently valid Lets Encrypt cert _could_ be a hint that something of that sort is going on, or it could be a legitimate (ie, non-buggy) failure for any number of reasons. Hard to sort that out without more data.

(Out of curiosity, for Arthur or anyone else seeing Lets Encrypt errors, can you say what is generating that message? Web browser? Some other downloader? ???)

—john