Project barriers (was Re: Self-Introduction: Chris Savage)

[Stuart Ellis]

On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 13:27 -0500, Paul W. Frields wrote: 
> > Click-throughs are passive, people can do them without thought.  The
> > sign-the-CLA-with-GPG is active.
> 
> But I agree that GPG signing emails is just frills compared with the
> CLA.  No reason people should go through that pain if they don't care.
> I've been using PGP/GPG so long that I don't, but it's obviously a
> significant barrier to some people, and since it's not necessary outside
> the CLA, we should remove or demote it like you said.  My ~$0.02.

FWIW, when I wrote that line I had a couple of things in mind: 

1) Since in practice you need a GPG key and a Linux box to contribute,
and the default GNOME mail client (Evolution) enables GPG with one
setting, signed e-mail is almost free (I thought). Kmail has GPG support
as well, I believe.

2) Doing the Right Thing: without some kind of signature, an e-mail just
isn't trustworthy, even though most people do assume the "From:" field
can be trusted. Which is slightly worrying, and something that I have to
explain semi-regularly as people receive infected or phish mails. With a
project like this, where contributors often only interact through IRC
and e-mail, signed mail is particularly valuable IMO.

Of course I hadn't looked at Thunderbird... It appears that the versions
of Enigmail provided by the developer are often incompatible with
Thunderbird builds provided by Fedora, and there isn't a package in the
Fedora repositories for Enigmail.

-- 

Stuart Ellis

stuart at elsn.org

Fedora Documentation Project: http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/

GPG key ID: 7098ABEA
GPG key fingerprint: 68B0 E291 FB19 C845 E60E  9569 292E E365 7098 ABEA
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