GnuPG 1.1.90 released

[Werner Koch]

On Wed, 3 Jul 2002 09:40:07 -0400, David Shaw said:

> My current inclination is that doing this is ok, but to add permission
> and ownership checks on the enclosing directory to go along with the
> existing ownership check of the extension file itself.  That can at
> least catch obvious configuration mistakes.  Werner, what do you

Yes, this should be done to be in sync with the other
do-not-shoot-yourself-into-the-foot-checks.  OTOH, I'd would prefer to
get rid of all that extension module code.  I wrote it originally to
work around the RSA and IDEA patents.  Nowdays the only reason for
this is probably the IDEA thing.  You all know my stance on that and I
don't want to start a discussion again.

The fact is that we should allow users in countries where IDEA is not
patented to use it.  Distributing idea.c as an extra source,
independent from gnupg, is one way to do it.  The other way to comply
with the GPL is by having a way to include extra ciphers into the
build process.  This way we won't distribute idea.c as part of a GnuPG
but still have the ability to build a binary more or less
automatically.  The drawback is that one won't be able to distribute a
binary then (which is fine with me but probably not for everyone).

So for what do you all use the extension mechanism right now?  And why
should we not compile everything in and have a mechanism to throw more
modules into the build process?

Regarding that one cipher I don't see a reason to have it configurable
at all - one fixed location should be sufficient.  

Furthermore I don't think it does really make sense to use
--enable-static-rnd=none to allow switching between different random
modules.  This used to be a nice feature for debugging, but given that
a couple of other applications also make use of EGD today, I don't
think this is required at all.

Adding new ciphers or hash algorithms does not make much sense unless
they are officially supported by OpenPGP and have a number assigned.
It is probably easier to grab a new GnuPG version in that case.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner