[Gpg4win-devel] X509 Root certificates and trusting them

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On 05/21/2010 12:03 PM, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> i) Place information more prominently!
>    Like: i.1) earlier in the readme, 
>             i.2) on the website while downloading
>             i.3.) during the installer
> ii) Phrase instructions better at all places
> iii) improve the error message if that condition is met to point people 
> towards the explanation.
> iv) possibly improve the certification manager to hint towards the condiation?
> 
> Important: The recommended way must be explained and reasoned for.
> The workaround (using allow-mark-trusted) must also be explained
> as what it is: A workaround.
> 
> Marcus, Emanuel, Werner, marc, can you please suggest improvements for 
> i),ii),iii), iv)?

ii) should be done anyway, but will not be effective to solve this particular
problem.  iii) would be good to have, but may pose technical challenges (for
example, detecting that the problem is a firewall rather than a different type
of network problem may be very hard, but I am not an expert).  And, in any
case, error messages are not sufficient here, as some of the issues are policy
issues and not error-related, so the trigger that causes errors to be signaled
is missing.   i) is completely useless: Nobody but me reads READMEs (that's a
fact).  Messages at download and installation times are untimely and we don't
even know if they are shown to the right person (or any person at all).
Misdirected messages are worse than silence.  I feel quite strongly about
this.  Software that tells me to do something later which could just as well
be done by the software at that later time automatically is totally lame.

iv) is a good compromise: It is technically trivial, but not untimely and can
be enriched in many ways (for example by offering to automatically set good
options for a certain use case scenario).  As a first approximation, one could
let Kleopatra self-test for lack of allow-mark-trusted resp. lack of disable
crl checks and pop up an explanation of these and why they might be useful.

Centrally administrated systems should be able to suppress those informational
texts by setting some options.  It would be sufficient to document that in a
README for administrators.

Thanks,
Marcus