Gnus

[Florian Weimer]

Werner Koch <wk@gnupg.org> writes:

>> find out who wrote exactly what.  Gpg.el had problems too which
>> lawyers supposedly was looking on, but I'm not sure what become of it.
>
> The university of Stuttgart is the bad guy.  We have talked in lengths
> on how to solve this problem without any positive result.

Really?  I don't know about that.

My first attempt failed because the FSF was unwilling to deal with the
issue.  We might have triggered some kind of internal response, but we
haven't received *any* statement from the FSF USA after we had
convinced RMS that there is indeed a legal difficulty.

> Afaik, Florian has given up on getting the legal papers.

More or less, yes.  

However, my main motivation is different: gpg.el is the wrong approach
from a technical point of view.  You might not have noticed, but the
first versions were able to support a traditional PGP 2.6.x command
line as well, just by reconfiguring it.  As a consequence, gpg.el
doesn't rely on --status-fd output, and it is difficult to add
additional features in a consistent way.  (The abstract command line
interface results in a lot of complexity, which is completely
unnecessary from the current perspective.)

So IMHO, gpg.el is just not worth all the trouble, especially since
most people who need it can grab it and install it (which is easy
compared to all the fuss you have to go through to get a decent Gnus
installation).

-- 
Florian Weimer 	                  Weimer@CERT.Uni-Stuttgart.DE
University of Stuttgart           http://CERT.Uni-Stuttgart.DE/people/fw/
RUS-CERT                          fax +49-711-685-5898