Re: Wherein I argue for the inclusion of libnettle in Emacs 24.5

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 21:28:00 -0500 Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote: 

>> The past few years I've argued for a few, and they've all been "free"
SM> They look free on the surface, but they're not free.

Users' time is not free either.  When you make them set up
infrastructure, install programs, learn other tools, and so on, that's a
burden too, and I think it's dishonest to say only developers' time
matters.

You wanted use cases, you got them.  At this point your objection to
using more of the GnuTLS API seems to be "because I want FFI."  You'll
get it, and I'll work on it.  I just think FFI is the wrong way to bring
in the GnuTLS ciphers and hashes.

SM> I want to move this outside the core, specifically so these things can
SM> develop much more rapidly.

Please see my objection to loose coupling of encryption primitives in
particular.  They are not regular features and they won't change often
at all.  This is a very low-risk addition to the core.

On Wed, 05 Feb 2014 14:11:59 +0900 Daiki Ueno <ueno@gnu.org> wrote: 

DU> On the other hand, who will trust such encrypting code written by a
DU> guy with no crypto/security background?
...
DU> As far as I know, only projects that have gotten problems with EPG were
DU> written by the same author who never try to understand the concepts of
DU> EPG/GPG and repeatedly pushes his own fancy crypto ideas with
DU> hypothetical use-cases.

Right.  Shelling out to an external binary every time you want to verify
a package's signature or want to encrypt/decrypt/sign data makes perfect
sense.

Blindly entering your passphrase in an anonymous popup that says it's
from the GnuPG agent is how things are done.

Trusting loosely coupled components is standard industry practice.

Forcing users to do all of that, or "no encryption for you" is for their
own good, on every platform where Emacs runs, from Android to W32 to Mac
OS X to many flavors of Unix.  Users are just too stupid to decide these
things on their own.

Is that how experts with a crypto/security background do it?  I'm
understanding now.

Ted