[132601] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Quiet in the list...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Sat Sep 6 10:27:49 2008
To: IanG <iang@systemics.com>
Cc: Ben Laurie <ben@links.org>, cryptography <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Date: Sat, 06 Sep 2008 10:27:33 -0400
In-Reply-To: <48C28E69.6030308@systemics.com> (iang@systemics.com's message of "Sat\, 06 Sep 2008 16\:06\:33 +0200")
IanG <iang@systemics.com> writes:
> Ben Laurie wrote:
>> IanG wrote:
>>> 2. GPG + Engimail + Thunderbird. Will never be totally robust because
>>> there is too much dependency.
>>
>> What does this mean? GPG + Enigmail, whilst not the best architecture I
>> ever heard of, is a tiny increment to the complexity of Thunderbird.
>>
>> Are you saying anything other than "big software has bugs"?
>
> No, interaction between different software packages has costs. When
> you spend time to load up Thunderbird, then load up enigmail, then
> load up gpg ... this is more work than just loading up Tbird and
> sticking with it.
>
> Then, when a new Thunderbird comes out, you load that up and the other
> packages cease to work. What do you do?
This is a ridiculous set of objections.
First, modern operating systems have tools so that users don't have to
manually build or "load up" various packages, they just cleanly
install. My non-computer literate relatives manage to install the
flash plugin for their browsers without assistance -- this is clearly
not an issue any longer.
Second, if your new version of thunderbird doesn't work with some old
plugin, don't upgrade until it does! Rollback is pretty easy on
Windows, OS X, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc. Not that this will happen in
practice if the plugin is popular.
Perry
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