Subject: Give Us Handles (PGP, folder compression)

From: Ran Ever-Hadani <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Apr 1994 18:22:19 -0700 (PDT)

On Wed, 6 Apr 1994, David L Miller wrote:

> There are some legal and political roadblocks to be passed before we would be
> comfortable adding PGP support.

Then don't give us PGP directly.  Have configuration variables called,
say, encrypt_cmd (for the user chosen encryption/verification program)
get_my_key_cmd (called by pine to get the user's private key -- this can
be bound to simply reading from a file or to uploading it from the user's
PC in case of a dial-in session) and get_their_key_cmd (to get some other
user's public key to verify their message or to encrypt messages sent to
them -- this would probably get bound to a program that accesses a public
key directory somewhere).  Then add the commands Sign and Encrypt to the
message composer, Verify and Decrypt to the message reader.  These
commands will be visible and activated only if the above variables are
set, and they will use these variables to know what to do. And then it is
the users' business what they binds their public key scheme to -- they can bind
it to Clipper if they like :)

The same approach can be taken as a temporary measure for folder
compression (which for me is very important).  Have three configuration
variables: compress_cmd, uncompress_cmd and compressed_suffix (which for
gzip will be .gz). 

The simplest initial implementation will be the following: in the folder
menu, there will be the command Compress which will compress the folder. 
>From then on, the folder will be displayed in the folders' screen by its
compressed file name (say large.gz), and when it is chosen for open it
will be uncompressed.  When such a folder is closed, the user will be
prompted with "compress folder large (y/n/^C)?" to decide whether this
folder is to be recompressed. 

The above should be quite easy to implement; at a later stage, it may be a 
good idea to actually incorporate gzip into pine, but this should not be 
a high priority IMO.

-- Ran

---

From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Apr 1994 22:50:58 -0700 (PDT)

Ran,

Techniques for using PGP with the current release of Pine have been
discussed over the past few days.  If you missed it, send me private mail
and I will forward you a copy. 

As far as compression goes, by far the cleanest and easiest to implement
solution is to write a c-client driver for a compressed mailbox format. 
As previously mentioned, we do not see a need for it on our systems,
therefore it is very low on our priority list.  

--DLM

|\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    [email-masked]  (206) 685-6240
|/ |_ |  |  Software Engineer, Pine Development Team   (206) 685-4045 (FAX)
University of Washington, Networks & Distributed Computing, JE-20
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA