Re: a proposed change to JSON output to report verification of PGP/MIME signatures.

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net>]

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On 11/16/2010 03:44 PM, Jameson Rollins wrote:
> Aren't clients going to have to interpret/display the output regardless
> of it's been verified or not?  It seems to me that understanding how to
> display the verified output is really not that much more difficult than
> understanding how to display the unverified output.

With json (and similar formats), it's easy to write a parser that says
"i know what to do with data member $foo -- give me that one".  This
lets you remain in blissful ignorance of data members $bar and $baz.

and if your backend suddenly starts throwing $qux at you as well, you
can just ignore it too, until you find you want to make use of it.

I imagine that someone writing a frontend would want to start with
things like message display, and not bother with fancier bits (such as
signature verification) until later.

frontends that know that their backend is somehow resource constrained
might also want to indicate to the user that a message claims to be
signed but not verify the signature unless the user asks for it.  (i
wish my current MUA had that feature, actually -- some messages i get
are signed but i don't personally need to verify them on every reload
(or even ever), depending on their content, but my MUA always makes me
wait for the verification process to happen.

To be clear -- i think that signature verification should be the default
situation for MUAs that are capable of doing it, but i don't think that
translates into --verify being on by default in
/usr/bin/notmuch.

	--dkg


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