Re: SFL and Balsa

[wil <wil dready org>]

Timothy: What's CDSA?

>
>Anyway the point is having S/MIME does not preclude the use of PGP/MIME.
>

But they are completely different and not-interoperable. It'd be great if 
Balsa could support both, but that's not an easy job. See below.

>>  > Another thing is, it is fairly difficult to both support S/MIME and 
>>PGP at
>>  > the same time (I don't even know of any commercial mailer that can 
>>do it).
>>  > GPG Made Easy is an API that is supposed to be generic but it looks 
>>pretty
>>  > young a project.
>
>Wrong.  Read up on multipart/encrypted (RFC 1847).  Any number of 
>mechanisms
>can coexist in this framework.
>

I'm referring to the implementation i.e. support both in a consistent 
interface in Balsa. Conceptually the operations are mostly similar, sign 
with private key, encrypt with public key, verify with public key, decrypt 
with privkey etc. I've seen the SMIME patch for mutt, it uses lots of 
#ifdef's mainly because mutt was hardwired for PGP. It would be painful to 
do that in Balsa. But is it worth defining an abstraction for just two 
standards?


| wil                   |
| http://www.dready.org