[gnutls-dev] The future of OpenCDK

[Mario Lenz]

Hi!

> It seems as if OpenCDK duplicate some of the functionality that
> properly belong to GnuPG.  However, as far as I know, there aren't any
> APIs in GnuPG to do what OpenCDK does, even if the functionality is
> there.

Yes, that's a problem. gpgme doesn't seem to be an alternative, either.
It's just a way to use gnupg from your application. I don't think you
can realise everything gnutls needs with it. 

> A serious question would be if we want to continue maintain
> OpenCDK at all. Making the same functionality be available from some
> GnuPG component could give some advantages -- such as smartcard
> support, gpg-agent support for passphrase caching, and hopefully
> better maintained code.
> 
> Right now I keep maintaining OpenCDK because we are stuck with it, and
> that approach rarely results in the best products...

I have the strong feeling that there's a lot of stuff in opencdk that's
not used by gnutls. (I can't proof it, though.) If you think that's ok,
give it it's own project. If opencdk is just a helper library to gnutls,
I'd suggest to keep it small and simple and throw away everything that's
not needed by gnutls.

This would be the first step. Then we would know what gnutls needs and
could think about possible replacements. Even if we would decide to keep
opencdk (because of no alternatives) this would make things easier
because there would be less code to maintain.

Well, if you think that's ok, I'd try to eliminate as much code from
opencdk as possible.

greez

   Mario

-- 
Wieners, in buns, no condiments. It's Hank's way. Anything else is
wrong.