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I have little direct evidence, but I suspect the problem is a set of programmers that hate the command line and never learned to rely on man pages. When they tr

by pdkl95 11y ago

I have little direct evidence, but I suspect the problem is a set of programmers that hate the command line and never learned to rely on man pages. When they try gpg, they try --help and see the giant list of options, and immediately panic. This same attitude may also explain the tendency to reinvent things like rsync and other tools that have accumulated a large set of options over the years.

ubernostrum 11y ago
I consider myself pretty comfortable with command lines, given that I more or less live in a terminal window for work purposes. GPG's particular command-line interface is still a counterintuitive mishmash of stuff that essentially boils down to having to look up a tutorial every single time I want to do anything related to key management. I've actually been known to ask people to email me just so I can fire up a mail client with Enigmail and have it auto-fetch the key into my keyring and set trust on it through their interface. Which, while not great, is light-years better than GPG's native key-editing interface.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  Is the command line interface that is confusing? Or is it that the crypto jargon is confusing? I suspect the latter, maybe? Regardless, just like any feature-rich technical library, this is easily solved by a front-end. For example, > Enigmail ...is an outstanding front end for many common uses. Unfortunately, the idea of writing a better UI front end for GPG - possibly many, specialized for various tasks - just like we've done for every other complicated piece of technology, it seems like everyone says "it's too complicated" and writes off GPG entirely. > native key-editing interface While I agree that interface is not the best (use Enigmail), I don't necessarily find it hard. It's very unrefined, tedious, and can be very annoying.
  - ubernostrum 11y ago
    It's very unrefined, tedious, and can be very annoying. This is the same as saying "hard".
  - lmm 11y ago
    > Regardless, just like any feature-rich technical library, this is easily solved by a front-end. Note that GPG is not a technical library. The primary "library" for using GPG consists of some functions that system() out to GPG and pipe data back and forth. I think this is a big impediment to getting better frontends (particularly on platforms other than linuxlike desktops).

by pdkl95 11y ago

ubernostrum 11y ago

I consider myself pretty comfortable with command lines, given that I more or less live in a terminal window for work purposes. GPG's particular command-line interface is still a counterintuitive mishmash of stuff that essentially boils down to having to look up a tutorial every single time I want to do anything related to key management. I've actually been known to ask people to email me just so I can fire up a mail client with Enigmail and have it auto-fetch the key into my keyring and set trust on it through their interface. Which, while not great, is light-years better than GPG's native key-editing interface.

pdkl95 11y ago
Is the command line interface that is confusing? Or is it that the crypto jargon is confusing? I suspect the latter, maybe? Regardless, just like any feature-rich technical library, this is easily solved by a front-end. For example, > Enigmail ...is an outstanding front end for many common uses. Unfortunately, the idea of writing a better UI front end for GPG - possibly many, specialized for various tasks - just like we've done for every other complicated piece of technology, it seems like everyone says "it's too complicated" and writes off GPG entirely. > native key-editing interface While I agree that interface is not the best (use Enigmail), I don't necessarily find it hard. It's very unrefined, tedious, and can be very annoying.
- ubernostrum 11y ago
  It's very unrefined, tedious, and can be very annoying. This is the same as saying "hard".
- lmm 11y ago
  > Regardless, just like any feature-rich technical library, this is easily solved by a front-end. Note that GPG is not a technical library. The primary "library" for using GPG consists of some functions that system() out to GPG and pipe data back and forth. I think this is a big impediment to getting better frontends (particularly on platforms other than linuxlike desktops).