Re: [Tails-dev] Please review'n'merge feature/monkeysign

On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 10:06:53AM +0000, sajolida@??? wrote:
> intrigeri:
> > Merged
>
> I push a minor documentation fix with commit f0762cd. Shall I merge it
> myself?

That seems minor and relevant, I guess you can. :)

> >> even if this might need a bit of documentationi though, as
> >> monkeysign errors out with a backtrace if one don't use the --no-mail
> >> option, as there is no /usr/sbin/sendmail in Tails. But the signature is
> >> added to the key still.
> >
> >> When using the --no-mail option, it outputs quite a lengthy mail, with
> >> mime headers and all, but that isn't really possible to use it in
> >> claws-mail, as you can't edit the email source. Best is probably to just
> >> paste the pgp public key bloc part of it into a new mail.
> >
> > Doesn't piping it to Mutt work?
> >
> > monkeysign currently being command-line only, I was thinking more of
> > Mutt users than Claws Mail's ones when I thought we wanted this in
> > Tails. Hopefully this will change at some point.

I've tried that, but couldn't find a way to have it working. That was a
short session though, I might have missed something.

> Note that monkeysign also includes and graphical tool for fingerprint
> scanning: monkeyscan; with QR codes and all :)

Which doesn't work in Tails, as we don't ship the recommends of monkeysign
(python-qrencode, python-gtk2, python-zbar, python-zbarpygtk). Not sure if
it is that usefull in Tails' usecase though (like, not running on a mobile
platform).

> > Regarding the need for documentation, well, I don't think this would
> > be a good use of our time. I expect that the kind of public that's
> > addressed by a command-line only piece of software will know what to
> > do with its output and manpage. Writing monkeysign documentation for
> > newbies seems very hard a task to me, and I doubt more than a handful
> > of people would benefit from it. If someone wants to make monkeysign
> > better suited for other kinds of users, IMHO they should instead write
> > a GUI for it, or (even better) integrate it into Seahorse,
> > or something.
>
> Agreed. I admit it is sometimes a bit blurry but our position was to
> only document on our website things that were specific to Tails (see the
> Pidgin and OTR documentation for example). So writing a tutorial on
> using monkeysign is out of scope. I admin that some pieces of software
> are documented beyond this requirement already (for example KeepassX)
> but it is also much more advertised and a key feature than monkeysign
> ever will be.
>
> I tried to improve a bit on this by improving the visibility of the list
> of included software from the documentation index. That's commit e8a33f6
> in master.

Agreed. That sounds relevant regarding our actual documentation. Having
given it a bit of tries, I believe monkeysign at the moment is only for
power users, they should be able to get it by themselves. If we want it to
be usable for everyone, I think we'd have to work a bit with upstream so
that it integrates a bit better.

bert.