On Fri, May 29, 2026 at 11:45:50PM -0400, marqueandreprisal--- via Gnupg-users 
wrote:
> No. It is not unavoidable a properly functioning PGP 1 without bugs like
> GnuPG has can fit on a floppy and runs on DOS. Actually you could do a 180
> and rebuild libs specifically for GnuPG but it is counterintuitive. There is
> no reason why developers can't develop fully functioning programs, believe
> it or not it can still be done even on these junk machines you can still
> build a full functional program and it could be a PGP clone that works
> right. Might could be.

OK, I'll bite. But only this once. I am not engaging in a long discussion.

...and what happens if, later, either the same developer or a different one
want to use some of the functionality without implementing it over and over
and over again? Or without copying source code that, if not maintained in
a library with versioned releases, *will* get stale and buggy?

There are many reasons a software developer may decide to break some of
the code out into a library. Most of them boil down to "...and I also want
to use this in that other program", but there are also others - shared
authorship, development by a different team for some specific subset,
many others. Also, there are many reasons a software developer may decide
to *use* an *already written* library instead of reimplenting the same
thing from scratch and taking months to stumble across all the bugs and
corner cases that *have already been solved* in the ready-made library.

It is true that any programmer can choose to write any specific program
from scratch without using any code already written. However, doing
that *always*, as a rule, would be just... silly. Very, very silly.

G'luck,
Peter

-- 
Peter Pentchev  [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
PGP key:        https://www.ringlet.net/roam/roam.key.asc
Key fingerprint 2EE7 A7A5 17FC 124C F115  C354 651E EFB0 2527 DF13

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: PGP signature

_______________________________________________
Gnupg-users mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users

Reply via email to