On 2/5/15 11:35 PM, Patrick Brunschwig wrote:
On 05.02.15 21:02, Doug Barton wrote:
On 2/4/15 11:01 PM, Patrick Brunschwig wrote:
The question is not so much the effort - you won't get a figure
from me. The main concern is code complexity, which makes things
hard to read, understand, develop, improve or fix.
Yes, I get that. :) But without some sort of quantification it's
impossible to intelligently answer the question, "Is the cost of
keeping the 1.x code in worth it compared to the benefit of
allowing Enigmail users to continue to use 1.x?"
From my perspective, until the majority of OS' that ship GnuPG are
shipping 2.x by default, removing 1.x support is premature. I
should add that I'm using that transition as a bellwether of sorts,
as I *think* that seeing this transition will also indicate that
the majority of end users have switched, and are comfortable with
the ways that GnuPG 2 is different.
"The majority of the OS" would be Linux and other Unix derivatives
only.
... which according to Ludwig's stats are 42% of your user base.
On Windows and Mac OS X, the two most common GnuPG tools would
ship 2.0.x.
For OS X I tend to agree. For Windows (51%) I continue to maintain that
there are way more 1.x users than you seem to be accounting for. I would
guesstimate that they are probably still the majority, but I have no
hard data on that.
It's worth pointing out that for Unix'y users (Linux and OS X) being
able to do gpg-agent and ssh-agent in the same binary provided *some*
compelling use case for the upgrade. However even that didn't exist for
Windows users until very recently, and anyone who needs ssh-agent on
Windows already has PuTTY.
And for Linux, how long do you want to wait any longer? As I wrote,
GnuPG 2.0 was released *8* years ago. If that transition didn't happen
"automatically" by now, then I think it's time to enforce it. The
arguments for Linux distributions to stick to GnuPG 1.4 seem to be
quite weak to me.
By that same token, what compelling use case does 2.0.x provide that
1.4.x does not? The gpg-agent is interesting, and potentially useful for
heavy command line PGP users; but for Enigmail's purposes you've already
got that covered. Personally I would still not have upgraded any of my
systems if I hadn't needed to work on 2.0.x support for my (Al)pine PGP
package.
OTOH, if you want to use Enigmail to advocate for the position that
users _should_ migrate to 2.0.x, that's a whole different kettle of
fish. I disagree quite strongly with your position, but I can't stop you
either. :)
More and more this sounds like you've already made up your mind. So
again, good luck with the support burden you're creating for yourself.
Doug
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