On 2/5/15 3:03 PM, Robert J. Hansen wrote:
From my perspective, until the majority of OS' that ship GnuPG are
shipping 2.x by default, removing 1.x support is premature.
This would be a problem if the OSes that ship Enigmail had no way to
make GnuPG 2 a dependency. Virtually all of them do, so I don't see the
problem.
Yes, the fact that you don't see the problem is in fact, part of the
problem. :)
You seem to be equating "A solution exists for this problem" with "This
problem will cause no inconvenience to users, or support burden for the
Enigmail team." That is a faulty equivalence.
I get the party line that we encourage people to use the packaged
version, which will fix the dependency problem, etc. etc. But we've
benefited from a significant decrease in support problems ever since
the machine-dependent code was removed from Enigmail, and "You must
use the packaged version!" became untrue.
It didn't become untrue. The point still remains that packagers are
allowed to do basically anything they want to Thunderbird, and we only
check the Enigmail available on our site against the Thunderbird
released by Mozilla.
Yeah, you've made that point a million times, and I'm not disagreeing
with you. MY point, which you seem determined to ignore, is that users
either don't know or don't care about that advice, especially first time
users who are perusing the Mozilla addons page. All this in spite of
your best intentions, since users are notorious for not following
instructions, even when they know about them.
So let me rephrase my argument ... The fact that the machine-dependent
code has been (almost completely) removed from Enigmail means that when
users are ignorant of and/or ignore the advice to get Enigmail from the
same source they get their Thunderbird the negative consequences to the
user are now very minimal, to the extent that messages to the list
requesting support on this topic have dropped dramatically, and to
levels approaching zero.
By changing the structure of Enigmail to once again make loading it from
your OS' package repo a practical necessity the number of support
requests on this topic will rise again. Now you can disagree with me on
how much they will rise, and you can state confidently that no matter
how much they do rise the Enigmail team is prepared to handle it, but
you cannot disagree with me that they will go up from present levels.
So my question is, "Is inconveniencing users and increasing support
costs worth it?" So far everyone that has answered has had some indirect
variety of "Yes;" either because they think that I am overestimating
these factors, or that the team can handle them, regardless of how large
they turn out to be.
Given that I've made my point several times now, I will step aside and
let others offer their own perspective.
Doug
PS, I hope I'm wrong.
_______________________________________________
enigmail-users mailing list
[email protected]
To unsubscribe or make changes to your subscription click here:
https://admin.hostpoint.ch/mailman/listinfo/enigmail-users_enigmail.net
