Re: encrypt.el in No Gnus 0.7

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    RS> I just looked at encrypt.el.  It appears to support just GnuPG
    RS> and "Built-in simple XOR".  And built-in simple XOR is just an
    RS> example, not for real use.

    The idea is to allow users to supply their own ciphers, and to support
    other external utilities as users find it necessary.

It is a sensible feature, but is it worth including in Emacs?  I am
not convinced this is sufficiently useful to be worth including.

Is there any sign that users use it?

    1) users don't have to install GnuPG to use simple obfuscation ciphers
    (yes, this is sometimes useful).

If you mean Rot13, aren't there other interfaces for that?  It seems
to me that we don't want to use the same command for Rot13 as we use
for GPG, because it is inconvenient to have to select one or the other
each time.  We want two different commands.

    3) other external utilities can be supported.

Are there any that are useful to support?

    4) ciphers, being Emacs Lisp code, can do almost anything: SSH to a
    remote machine, use BBDB, use IMAP, use version control...

I really don't like the idea of labeling such things as "encryption".

All in all, encrypt.el still looks like unnecessary complexity which
doesn't pull its weight.