Which type of key should I choose and why?

[Paul L. Allen]

[Please Cc responses as I'm not subscribed to the list]

On Sun, Oct 15, 2000 at 08:27:11AM -0500, No User wrote:
> [Sunday, 15/10/2000] Paul L. Allen:
> > I looked in the FAQ.  It didn't help.  Worse, the FAQ has a bloody awful
> > user-interface.  I can understand an FAQ maintainter not wanting to end
> > up answering all sorts of questions by himself.  But the following
> > things make that FAQ seriously flawed:
>
> The FAQ maintainer is not the right person to answer questions about GPG.

But he *ought* to be the person who points out where to get answers.  In
this he has failed dismally, since the top of his FAQ contains
statements which logically lead to the conclusion that it is not
possible to get answers to questions which are not already in the FAQ.
He does mention mailing lists further down but by then many will have
given up in despair.

> You need the (searchable) gpg-users mailing list archives. You will find
> what other people asked and what the answers were. Do your homework,
> instead of expecting the FAQ maintainer(s) to do it for you.

I do expect the FAQ maintainer to do his job properly.  He hasn't.  An
FAQ which starts out by discouraging people is a bad FAQ no matter how
good the rest of it is.

I do not expect a product which is supposedly competing with commercial
and semi-commercial products to require me to trawl around what is going to
be a vast archive, 90% of which will be inanity, to find the answer to
a question which is apparently so infrequently asked that it isn't in
the FAQ.

I do expect that when the main page http://www.gnupg.org states:

  Please send questions about using, compiling and installing GnuPG
  to gnupg-users@gnupg.org [...]
  
then that is the correct thing to do.

I do expect that if I were expected to trawl the mailing list archives
first rather than enquire on the mailing list, as you suggest, that
the main page would tell me to do that rather than telling me to
enquire on the mailing list.  If you are right, then that is another
flaw in GPG documentation...

I would also point out that if everyone trawls the mailing list, as
you suggest, and finds answers, there will be no feedback as to what
is actually an FAQ and the FAQ will never reflect the questions people
actually want answers to.  Of course, something like FAQ-o-matic would
reduce the burden on the mailing list as being part of the feedback loop
in determining what is and isn't an FAQ, but I have to work with what's
currently in place.

In short, read what I wrote rather than what you think I wrote; think
about the implications of what I wrote before blindly responding; do
your own bloody homework first.

-- 
Paul

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