RE: Seahorse re: 2.4 Proposed Modules

[Jacob Perkins <jap1 users sourceforge net>]

On Mon, 2003-05-05 at 06:30, Andrew Sobala wrote:
> Hi Jacob,
> 
> I've just downloaded seahorse to try it out.
> 
> On Mon, 2003-05-05 at 08:10, Jacob Perkins wrote:
> > URL: http://seahorse.sourceforge.net
> > 
> > Description: Seahorse is a frontend for gnupg. The goal is to try to
> > integrate seahorse/gpg into gnome in order to make key management
and
> > crypto easier.
> > Key management is basically as complete as can be right now, except
for
> > key server support.
> 
> wrt. the "seahorse" binary, I think it's very confusing if you don't
> know how gpg works. Let me give a non-gpg user's reaction to using it.
> 
> I start it up and I see a list of people. I click on one of them to
look
> at their key and choose properties. Now we're in jargon rich
territory.
> I see tabs for "Primary key", "User ID", "Subkey 1"... a lot of
widgets
> are insensitive, presumably because of limitations in the protocol,
but
> I don't know why. It appears I can add signatures to keys, although
it's
> insensitive, and I don't know what they are.

Right, I neglected to hide all of the disabled widgets in the properties
window. These are disabled because of limitations of gpg. And yes it is
jargon rich, but the app is fairly specific, so I'm not sure how to get
around that besides having good documentation.

> 
> I can sign keys apparently - the program gives me a warning asking if
> I'm sure I want to, but no indication of why I might not.

The confirmation dialogs need some love, and most are questions, which
I've heard is not recommended.

> 
> > Gnome integration is being worked on. Right now this includes a
context
> > menu for nautilus and a control center capplet for configuring
pgp/gpg.
> 
> The context menu is nice, although I think "decrypt" should always
> attempt to validate signatures and give a report on them instead of
> having a separate "decrypt and sign" option.

This makes sense.

> 
> The capplet is a waste of space. It essentially lets me set a "Default
> Key", and enable/disable 3 options named "Ascii armor", "Text mode"
and
> "Encrypt to self." I don't actually know what these are, but it sounds
> like a case for sensible defaults.

This makes sense too, except for the default key. There is no tooltip
for it (or the others) right now, but if there was it would say that the
default key is the key used for signing operations. There are times when
one may want to have a different key for signing, and there needs to be
a good way to change this.
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