pgp/mime vs in-line pgp

[Len Sassaman]

On Wed, 14 Apr 2004, Doug Barton wrote:

> > Unfortunately, it's not that easy. Pine is under a "non-free" license, and
> > the Pine authors have repeatedly rejected such patches.
>
> One could argue that large parts of this thread have been off topic for
> this list, however I'm firmly of the opinion that the type of political
> rhetoric about licenses that you've stated here is definitely off topic,
> and personally I'd appreciate it if it was just skipped altogether.

It is fortunate then that your opinion is irrelevant to this discussion.

> > They have no interest in OpenPGP support, period.
>
> I'm not sure this is accurate either, or at least I think you're being
> too specific by mentioning OpenPGP. It would be safer to say that PGP
> integration in general has not been a goal for the Pine development
> team, and that it's handled fairly well by a variety of third party
> plugins.

It is handled horribly. Show me one good plugin that supports PGP well.
PGP4Pine? pgpenvelope? I've been involved in the development/testing of
both of those for years, and they both are horrible. It is the latter that
I use, since it is the best that Pine can get us, but that doesn't mean it
is good. This is a fault not of the authors of the plugins, but of the
Pine plugin API.

> In regards to the MIME issue, Pine doesn't give the user the ability to
> manipulate attachments at all, so you can't create PGP MIME messages.

A major flaw in Pine.

> therefore need to find valid solutions. If you are not in that group,
> lucky you, but telling those of us who are that our concerns are
> pointless isn't really useful.

When did I ever say anything about pointless?

I am a Pine user. I believe Mutt to be greatly at fault for much of the
PGP/MIME issues, by their repeated propaganda attempts to convince PGP
users that inline-signatures are "old-style" or "deprecated" in favor of
the PGP/MIME format (originally devised by the author of Mutt,
surprisingly enough.)

But none of this changes the fact that the answer to Pine's problems is
*not* "go implement it yourself and it will all be better."

In order for there to be good OpenPGP/MIME support in Pine, the Pine
authors must decide there will be. There is no possibility of a fork. This
is something that is fact, and you will need to deal with if you are a
Pine user.