Re: Proposal for Seahorse inclusion in GNOME 2.18

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Sun, 2006-09-10 at 07:48 -0400, Adam Schreiber wrote:
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> Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > On Sat, 2006-09-09 at 22:04 +0000, Nate Nielsen wrote:
>    * Text encryption (gedit plugin)
> >>   * A panel-applet for those with special clipboard encryption needs.
> > 
> > What's that applet actually for? I don't quite understand how that would
> > be used and/or useful to the majority of our users.
> 
> The panel applet was created because a lot of my friends indicated that
> a barrier to using encryption for their email was that they use web mail
> a significant amount of the time.  The panel applet allows the user to
> copy text perform an encryption operation on it and paste the new text
> to a field or in the case of reading mail display the text in a window
> via a preference setting.  In any case the applet has to be added by a

Wouldn't a better integration be a web browser plugin, that allows
people to encrypt what's in a text field?

> user before it sits in the panel.  I'm not sure that "used and/or useful
> to the majority of our users" is a fair criterion as both geyes and
> wanda are distributed as default.  They're fun and good applet examples,
> but do they fit your stated criteria?

geyes and wanda are relics of the past. We would include all kinds of
crap into GNOME if those were the examples of what needs to be done to
get included in GNOME.

> > 
> >> Other
> >>   * Rendezvous based key sharing to share a pool of keys on a network
> > 
> > I guess you mean "Bonjour" here
> 
> Bonjour, Howl, Avahi, DNS-SD whichever the term you like, but we use Avahi.

Bonjour is the trademarked name for the technology. The "free" name is
Zeroconf. Howl and Avahi are implementations of that standard, DNS-SD is
a different technology.

> >> The Seahorse developers' long term goal is to make encryption easy to
> >> use within GNOME. Besides filling a need for a key manager, inclusion in
> >> GNOME would help us realize that goal. For example:
> >>
> >>   * EDS Address book integration
> >>   * About-me: 'my' encryption key selection
> >>   * More intelligent trust metrics based on frequency of use
> > 
> > Do you already patches for some of this functionality?
> > A patch to replace Evolution's "Contact Certificates", at least as a
> > compile-time option, would be a good start.
> 
> What? We don't get to list our plans for the current development cycle?

Sure you can list them. But you don't get included into GNOME on
plans ;)

> > I believe that the integration should be done ahead of time, even if it
> > is a compile-time option, something that users/distributions have got to
> > opt-in to.
> 
> Most of the integration occurs as plugins that a user would have to load
> or "opt-in to".

The about-me and EDS changes you mentioned above don't look like they
would be. The point I'm trying to make is that if the functionality and
integration is already available as an opt-in, it would be much easier
for us to turn around and bless Seahorse into the release.
Right now, I don't think the integration is deep enough, and that
Seahorse would benefit from being integrated into the release (although
it certainly is a good application of its own right).

Cheers

-- 
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>