Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!altnet!edc
From: edc@ALTOS.COM (Eric Christensen)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: Crypt() in Elm - This may be a problem!
Message-ID: <520@altnet.ALTOS.COM>
Date: 27 Jun 88 09:50:08 GMT
References: <470@altnet.ALTOS.COM> <278@clout.Jhereg.MN.ORG> <485@altnet.ALTOS.COM> <10291@ncc.Nexus.CA> <1060@datapg.DataPg.MN.ORG>
Reply-To: edc@altnet.UUCP (Eric Christensen)
Organization: Altos Computer Systems, San Jose, CA.
Lines: 34

In article <10291@ncc.Nexus.CA> lyndon@ncc.nexus.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg) writes:
>
>As far as I am concerned, if two people want to send each other encrypted
>mail they should implement their own compatable (with each others)
>crypt(1) replacement. I don't think encryption should be part of the UA.
>

I have to agree with Lyndon on this one. After evaluating several diferent ways
to encrypt messages, I kept coming back to the same problem. Whatever we do for
Elm will be incompatible with all other mail systems (few of which have any
encryption at all). 

My proposed solution: remove the crypt option from Elm. Wait!!!! Don't flame me
yet! Besides the compatability problems there is another concern here. It's
very easy to add feature after feature to a package like Elm. This is fine up
to a point, but when you start adding features that most people won't or can't
use, you're not increasing the worth of the package at all. In fact, you may
be decreasing it's worth, based on the fact that you're adding more code, which
makes it harder to maintain and keep portable (can you sy 80286? :-).

If nobody comes up with a real good reason to keep the crypt calls, I'm going
to yank them (or at least ifdef them out). And I don't plan on spending any
more time working on this issue. After all, there are "real" bugs to be fixed,
and a release to get out.

-- 
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| Eric D. Christensen     | Email: edc@altnet.altos.com  (uunet!altnet!edc)   |
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