Re: Wherein I argue for the inclusion of libnettle in Emacs 24.5

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Wed, 5 Feb 2014 09:00:58 -0800 chad <address@hidden> wrote: 

c> On 05 Feb 2014, at 05:41, Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> wrote:
>> qmail and Postfix are system applications that run as daemons.
>> Completely different from Emacs.  Emacs is more like Firefox or Chrome
>> with their embedded Javascript engines and layout renderers, as Lars
>> pointed out.  Those applications tend to use the platform's keychain
>> facilities and do the crypto work internally.

c> Are there *any* other applications (note that I did not say servers)
c> that use external programs for encryption? Hell, *mutt* supports
c> the features that Lars and Ted want. So do nmh and alpine. What
c> doesnt?

There are some successful applications like that.  Git uses external
credential and transport ("remote") helpers by design.  I even wrote a
netrc/authinfo helper for Git to decode a netrc .gpg file using GnuPG;
see https://github.com/git/git/tree/master/contrib/credential/netrc

I don't think any plaforms like Emacs have made the design choice to
leave encryption only to external tools.  I'm comparing it to Firefox
and Chrome; Thunderbird and the other mail clients you mentioned; and
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/javax/crypto/package-tree.html
for Java.  Usually there are plugins and optional libraries to use
OpenPGP or GnuPG itself.

Ted