On Sun, Nov 03, 2002 at 12:41:11PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
| To expand on this point a bit, I suspect one of the main reasons people
| who once used PGP stop using it, either privately or at corporations
| (as we have heard folks here testify about), is because something
| changes and things "break."
|
| They upgrade their OS, they get a new release of a mailer, and things
| break. And they don't have the time, energy, or inclination to track
| down all of the little gotchas that may have cause things to break. I
| know this happened to me several times over the years with various
| versions of PGP, Eudora, and Mac OS 7, 8, and 9.
These breaks have three causes:
1) changes in the PGP 'api,'
2) changes in the OS causing PGP to break,
3) changes in PGP causing it to not interoperate.
My experience (mostly on unix) says that 1 and 3 are responsble for
far more problems than 2. That is to say, PGP beaks because it isn't
stable, not because the OS or apps aren't stable.
PGP API changes used to be explainable by the need to do something
else not previously thought of. Now it seems to be fashionable to
make changes in minor versions (gpg 1.06 to 1.07 for example, changed
a bunch of things, rather than holding them back to 1.2) PGP
developers need to recognize this and make their APIs stable.
Changes in PGP are of two forms: First is message encoding (PGP/Mime,
x-application-pgp, what have you. Those seem to be fewer in number,
although I still don't know if mutt's default encoding is right or
not. The second was the penchant of PGP to add new algorithms for
first patent and then speed reasons. Patent reasons are
understandable, but the speed of PGP was never enough reason to add
CAST and make it a default.
So, almost all of these reasons are things that fall under the control
of people doing development, who need to understand that their choices
(new algorithms, new APIs, new message formats) are making it too much
of a bother to get even half-decent message privacy.
They don't have a lot to do with the mailers, newsreaders, or OS
changes that are outside developers control.
Adam
--
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
-Hume
