On Wed, 13 Jul 1994 Jueneman(_at_)gte(_dot_)com wrote:
The DUA I am presently using evaluating, InfoBroker 1.0 from DEC, [...]
[...nice description of graphical interface deleted...]
While trendy, this does demonstrate one of the problems I've always had with
X.400/X.500. And that is: to get a minimal system you have to go to an
awful lot of trouble and have to assume the user has certain kinds of
equipment or network connectivity.
For example, the minimal mail editing and submission system for RFC-822
mail is a text editor plus some way to blatt the resultant text file at
an SMTP port or a UUCP queue. The X.400 alternative? Lot's of mucking
with BER and obscure magic numbers, with a real-time connection to a
network for directory lookups. A major programming project. Now, the
minimal RFC-822 system is not friendly, but it is usable enough to get
things done until such time as you can bootstrap yourself up to a better
level.
If the minimal requirement for certificate search and management for PEM
is a graphical user agent in an age when the Unix command-line is still
king then deployment will, I believe, naturally be slow. That doesn't
rule out a curses based user interface for certificate management of course,
but such an interface doesn't currently fit in well with the existing
Internet mail systems. Result: we need to rewrite much of the existing
software just so we can get PEM functionality in a friendly fashion.
It takes time to reinvent the wheel to use a different kind of nut.
Meanwhile, PGP leaps ahead. It may use e-mail addresses which aren't
scaleable to the entire universe, but it is beating us silly. In the
end, it may be easier to bolt a scaleable naming system onto PGP when
the user community finally feels the need for it.
Cheers,
Rhys.