Re: Proposal for Seahorse inclusion in GNOME 2.18

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Sat, 2006-09-09 at 22:04 +0000, Nate Nielsen wrote:
> Seahorse is a encryption key manager for GNOME. It currently 'manages'
> PGP and SSH keys (work has been done on X.509 certificates [1]).
> 
> The Seahorse developers would like to propose Seahorse 0.9.x for
> inclusion in GNOME. It offers:
> 
> libcryptui
>   * An API for querying the keys on the system, searching key servers,
>     widgets to select keys.
>   * D-Bus based.
> 
> Key Manager
>   * Creation of SSH keys and GPG keys
>   * Configuration of keys, import, export etc..
>   * The interface and concepts for users are getting simpler
>     and clearer with each release.
>   * gnome-keyring integration for GnuPG and OpenSSH
>   * HKP and LDAP key server integration
>   * SSH key authorization and upload

Is the SSH support integrated to Nautilus? For example, if I were to try
and access the files on a remote server using Nautilus/gnome-vfs, would
I see seahorse helping me authorise/deny the server's key first?

> Plugins
>   * File encryption (nautilus plugin)
>   * Text encryption (gedit plugin)
>   * A panel-applet for those with special clipboard encryption needs.

What's that applet actually for? I don't quite understand how that would
be used and/or useful to the majority of our users.

> Other
>   * Rendezvous based key sharing to share a pool of keys on a network

I guess you mean "Bonjour" here

> The Seahorse developers' long term goal is to make encryption easy to
> use within GNOME. Besides filling a need for a key manager, inclusion in
> GNOME would help us realize that goal. For example:
> 
>   * EDS Address book integration
>   * About-me: 'my' encryption key selection
>   * More intelligent trust metrics based on frequency of use

Do you already patches for some of this functionality?
A patch to replace Evolution's "Contact Certificates", at least as a
compile-time option, would be a good start.

I believe that the integration should be done ahead of time, even if it
is a compile-time option, something that users/distributions have got to
opt-in to.

-- 
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>