Re: [Pan-users] git-pan heads-up! Sigs

[Duncan]

Duncan posted on Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:10:32 +0000 as excerpted:

> I have gpg but don't use gnome and thus don't have gnome-keyring
> installed, so don't expect I see the full featureset.

Seems that the new kde 4.8, of which I'm now running 4.7.95 aka 4.8-rc1, 
has a new set of apps called ksecrets, which together (ksecrets client, 
ksecretsserviced daemon, various libs, config and infrastructure) 
implement the freedesktop.org freedesktop.org secrets API.

Another implementor of said API is gnome-keyring.

So it may be that I eventually get the full featureset in any case, at 
least as long as pan implements the API without requiring that the whole 
gnome-keyring setup be installed to build.

But at present I've no idea how, or even if, this new toy I built as part 
of the kde I just built, actually works.  Running the apps from the 
command line with --help is surprisingly uninformative, even for kde/gui 
apps, simply running ksecrets without any parameters just spits out the 
same uninformative help output, and the docs located in the docs dir 
consist of three TODOs and two READMEs, one of which simply links a 
techbase.kde.org page I've not looked at yet, the other of which has a 
short paragraph saying it implements the XDG secrets API as does gnome-
keyring, nothing else.  In the apps menu I see an iconless "Secret 
Service Handling Tool" under Lost and Found, which if I load it in 
kmenuedit to see what's up, looks like it simply runs "ksecrets", again 
with no parameters, which as I said simply spits out some help on STDOUT, 
which from an apps menu item is simply going to be closed... so no help 
there either.

Well, it /is/ an rc, and neither of the betas had the service at all so 
it's appearing first in an rc.  And I guess I do have that techbase page 
to look at still, but it's certainly not a very promising start, for sure!

But I guess if kde4 itself can do actual releases for over two and a half 
years (4.0-4.5 in 6-month intervals), and a year and a half after they 
claimed reasonable user quality (claimed for 4.2 out of the one side of 
their mouth while at the same time they were still replying to bugs with 
"oh, that's not ported yet", major features missing is a primary mark of 
alpha, not even beta let alone rc or release, yet they were claiming 
release quality!), before they actually get to REASONABLE release quality 
(4.5, as generally agreed by many), then a new app can certainly skip the 
betas, appear in an rc as the first alpha/beta quality release, and given 
recent history, appear in at least two release-stable series before it 
actually gets anywhere, which would put it at 4.10 or 4.12... or 5.x... 
before it's actually reasonably usable.  Oh, well...

(... And yes, I AM a kde /supporter/!)

If anything, pan went the other way, continuing to point people at the 
old 0.14.x C-based stable code long after pretty much everyone was using 
the new 0.90+ C++ code.  But better that and let people upgrade as they 
will, than the kde way of lying about stability and readiness, saying the 
new version was ready when it clearly wasn't, for sure!

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman