Why the software is crap

[Jay Sulzberger]

On Fri, 14 Nov 2014, david at gbenet.com wrote:

> Hello All,
> 
> I even tried exporting my private and public key from the
> command line and then tried importing. The same error message
> as before. I have checked on the internet - most of the
> suggestions are crap - the authors have never ever tried to do
> what they suggest others to do. If they had done so then they
> would have known just how crappy their supposed expertise was.
> 
> I have even looked through
> https://www.gnupg.org/faq/GnuPG-FAQ.html and found this to be a
> useless pile of crap also.
> 
> I am faced with two options:
> 
> (1) Create yet another set of keys
> (2) Give up using gnupg after some 20 years
> 
> I think I will unsubscribe from this list and give up on gnupg as a pile of crap.
> 
> David

Of course you are, in part, right.  GnuPG should be easier to set
up and use.  The GnuPG team is well aware of this and work to
make GnuPG easier to use.  But your claims as to the difficulty
of moving keys are not true.  Yesterday at a large organization,
I explained to a cow-orker how to create and distribute keys.
The meeting did not take two hours.  We are now testing the
sub-system, and so far, it seems to work, that is, it does the
job of encryption and decryption.

You claim that you cannot just copy over .gnupg from machine A to
machine B and get a working set of keys on machine B.  But I have
done this successfully more than a few times.  I do not have a
page of instructions, but if you wish, I will meet with you and
we can try to find and/or write such a page.  I think there
already exists such a page, published on the Net, and published
in paper and ink book form, but I will not look for it now.

oo--JS.