[techtalk] Which PGP?

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2000 at 12:13:34PM -0500 or thereabouts, Subba Rao wrote:
> On  0, Nils Philippsen <nils at wombat.dialup.fht-esslingen.de> wrote:
> > 
> > I wouldn't use the "original" PGP as it has a pretty dumb license and this
> > backdoor crap. I use the GNU Privacy Guard (www.gnupg.org) and am content
> > with it so far.
> 
> Thanks for replying. Is GNU PG easy to use?

I personally (and your mileage may vary on this) find it easier than
PGP. I found PGP's command line options tricky. I hadn't realised how
used I'd got to the idea that you could write "command -a -b" as
"command -ab", and that with GNU programs you could often do
"command --alpha --beta" (ie, use words after a double hyphen) and
mix those with the short ones.

PGP's command options always confused me, because they're nothing
like that at all. (xterm and associated programs' options confuse
me, too, yes :)) GnuPG has the short options and the longer ones, 
which remind me what it is I'm doing :)

The documentation for GnuPG seems reasonable. I understood it,
and that's definitely a good sign. The whole area of encryption
and cryptography is an almost-closed book to me, so if I can
read it and have a reasonable idea of how to use it, I think
most people can. This isn't some false modesty: for some reason,
my brain absolutely melts when it comes to this subject!

It was certainly easy to swap from using PGP with mutt to using
GnuPG with mutt, which is the primary reason I wanted it.

One thing to beware of: it can take quite a while to generate
your initial key, and the signatures can be vast.

Telsa

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