Re: libnettle/libhogweed WIP

[Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> > How is this different from write-region and its ilks?
>> 
>> Off the top of my head:
>> - it's new, so we get to avoid past errors
>
> Not sure what past errors you had in mind.  Any errors we made in the
> encoding/decoding department were fixed by Emacs 23, and the stuff is
> remarkably stable since then, with a single minor improvement in Emacs
> 24.4.  From my POV, this one of the greatest success stories in Emacs.
> Paid for with sweat, blood, and tears, but success nonetheless.  Why
> would we want to refrain from reusing it?

These are encryption primitives.  Stuffing code that guesses What I Mean
into these primitives doesn't seem like the most productive way to
proceed.  If somebody later wants to add a DWIM framework on top of
these primitives (to, say, automatically encrypt everything that Emacs
saves), that's a different thing.

But the primitives themselves should, in my opinion, be functional and
predictable: You give them explicit inputs and you always get the same
result back.

Encryption is also often used in conjunction with various protocols, and
(as opposed to saving files locally) the local user's preferences are
irrelevant to how the octets are supposed to be encoded on the wire.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no