Docs central, with 'Email Self-Defence'

Kristy Chambers K.Chambers at openmailbox.org
Sat Jun 14 22:33:07 CEST 2014


I think providing an official, complete, easily-understandable,
up-to-date, reviewed and qualitative documentation by experts for
beginners and experts is absolutely necessary for security-software.
Therefore GnuPG is in need of that.

If I have a (superficial) look on the documentations, FAQs, HOWTOWs and
manuals of/about GnuPG, I would say some of them look a little bit sale.
A potential gpg-interested person could probably not know, where to
start. Some documents are old and incomplete. I'm not saying that old
manuals are implying bad manuals (some options haven't changed for long,
therefore no change in docs in need).

After all, I don't have the feeling, that the docs (where some of them
are really good) linked on the GnuPG-page are providing, what I
mentioned in the first sentences of my message.

Although some people would probably deny, that it's not the job
gnupg.org to provide a good tutorial about using gpg for e-mail-security
with some other gpg-related software like Enigmail+Thunderbird, I would
really appreciate it. Bad tutorials on the web reaffirm my thoughts on
that. Actually I think it would be really cool, if there are official
statements/comments about gpg-related software. This could maybe help
users decision of trusting some gpg-related software or the developers.
It could also probably put software developers under pressure, who are
writing wrong software. Enigmail is the best example for that. Many
people are relying on that piece of software. Many (wrong) tutorials on
the web are talking about Thunderbird+Enigmail. The documentation of it
is not that bad I think, but could be better, but the most annoying
thing is that Enigmail is broken by default because of the default trust
of all keys. Who if not GnuPG-experts should write good,
easily-understandable tutorials about the practical use of gpg by
beginners for e-mail-encryption?

Last but not least, a lot of gpg-related things are not matured in my
opinion. Nor the documentation, nor the graphical front-ends, nor the
mua-plugins, nor the OpenPGP-standard itself.

When if not now is the time for finally bring this stuff in a neat quality?

K.C.



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