Various design questions

[Simon Josefsson]

George Staikos <staikos@kde.org> writes:

> On Saturday 20 October 2001 13:58, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
>=20
>> >    I know that you have to make this compatible with Mutt, but do you =
not
>> > agree that things like key management should be integrated with the KDE
>> > crypto manager?  I think it would be unfortunate for users to have to
>> > import their keys in two places and manage them twice.
>>
>> The optimal solution would be that keys are held in one place
>> and can be accessed by several "front-ends".
>> GpgSM will be this part in the diagramm of
>> 	http://www.gnupg.org/aegypten/tech.en.html
>>
>> AFAIUI Gpgme will be the api which can be used by several programs
>> to control the keydatabase.
>=20
>    The only real way to get this to work now is to have the KDE GUI searc=
h=20
> both key databases.  We have to have our own.  Not anyone will want to=20
> install this project but they may want to use SSL in Konqueror or code=20
> signing in Reaktivate.   This also raises another question:  When a user=
=20
> imports a new key via the GUI, which database does it go into?  The GPG o=
ne=20
> or the KDE one?  Or both?  Or do we prompt the user?  I guess by using th=
e=20
> md5 fingerprint it's easy to remove duplicates so that isn't a problem.=
=20=20
> KMail should use the KDE key manager though, not the GPG one  (but the KD=
E=20
> key database can of course merge at runtime with the GPG one).  It would =
be=20
> terribly unfortunate for a user to import a key into the KDE database and=
=20
> then not get to use it from within a KDE application.

IMHO there should be a command line interface (or dynamic library
ditto) to =C4gypten, and Kmail etc could use it, via the KDE key
manager.  Then non-KDE stuff such as Gnome and other applications
(e.g., Emacs) could interface to the same database as well, without
the need of interfacing with a full-blown widget-specific GUI.  It
would be unfortunate if all programs that need security has to require
KDE, especially considering text-only apps such as Mutt.