Thomas> Yes this is true, but we will have to weigh in the options and see which Thomas> solution is most suitable, which depends on what the final plan will be. Thomas> cheers Thomas> Thomas
My whole point was that two orthogonal solutions exist. They are not mutually exclusive, but complementary. Long-term designs, code, and solutions will take months. In the meantime, the rest of us would like a near term solution. So the solutions complement each other in that respect. The user can maintain independent control over GPG; he will not have the same control over Mahogany internals. Like The Bat!, it would be nice if Mahogany would offer a choice. So these solutions complement in that respect too. richard> having said this, i guess i should also point out that there's a simple richard> command line utility for handling S/MIME in apps/smime.c in the current richard> OpenSSL distribution, so a cheezy S/MIME interface is feasible on similar richard> terms to a cheezy GPG interface. Thanks for pointing this out. It bolsters my earlier comments about a generalized command-line interface opening all kinds of nice tools to Mahogany users. Things like HTMLTidy for example. I object to the term "cheezy" -- the command lines are in fact automated by the user application. From the user's standpoint there is not a lot of difference from, say, a DLL call. Moreover it bears repeating that having separate, stand-alone crypto units offers the following advantages: (1) external development work is leveraged; (2) higher confidence in correct results; (3) elimination of possible legal export issues in Mahogany; (4) end user control over his own crypto system. richard> however, the interesting, complicated, and essential problem to be solved richard> is that of certificate handling for S/MIME, and while i'm no GPG/PGP richard> expert, i suspect that key handling rates similarly. richard> richard This is wrong. Key handling is a user function. All that GPG lets people do is sign them. Signatures are not even mandatory. S/MIME will be a fairly big project and I'm keen to get GPG *now*. I guess until some sort of consensus develops that a command-line GPG would be a Good Thing in the near term, I will stick with my trusty Bat! emailer, and let you guys hash out the future of Mahogany. Maybe when I have a spare weekend I will implement the idea and present the results for approval. I just don't want to waste that time unless there's some indication it would go into CVS. On the topic of parsing, here is a nice, free, regular expression library that may help with some S/MIME problems down the road. It lets you define Perl expressions in your C code and execute them at runtime. Something like an embedded Perl interpreter. I dislike Perl but realize that it's just the thing for regex work in some circles, and probably OK in that limited problem domain. http://www.pcre.org/ Best regards, Mark ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Two, two, TWO treats in one. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Mahogany-Developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mahogany-developers
