No more plug-ins?

[David Champion]

* On 2002.08.09, in <3D53AA601D6.9353RICH@mail.a-znet.com>,
*	"Rich" <rich@cnylug.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 09 Aug 2002 11:11:53 +0200 the voices in my head told
> me that Werner Koch <wk@gnupg.org> said:
> 
> >Patents are not a real problem with ECC. However, there won't be any
> >plugin support for GnuPG anymore and even more importaant: OpenPGP
> >does not define and EC algorithm.

This is disappointing, but maybe it won't be such a large problem.
Currently I use the plugin support for two things:

    1. IDEA support. (I won't mean to get into arguments about this. I
    work for a nonprofit institution, so our use is noncommercial, and
    we can legally use it.)

    2. User-selectable RNGs. We run mostly on Solaris. Some machines
    have a real /dev/random, and use rndlinux. Others do not and can
    not, so we use rndegd or rndunix, depending on circumstances. With
    plugins, we don't need to compile two or three different versions
    of the executable for our software distribution system -- just
    uncomment the appropriate line in .gnupg/options.

I didn't think it was possible to compile IDEA into GnuPG or to compile
in multiple RNG drivers. But if I"m wrong, or if this is changing, I'll
have no complaints about removal of the plugin support.


I still don't really understand why you're so opposed to the plugins,
aside from irritation about people's using IDEA at all, but maybe that's
not important. I would only worry that in the future, it might again
prove useful, and we'd lament its loss.

-- 
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