[Enigmail] official protocol for external helper program

Wed Dec 19 07:31:02 PST 2007

If you are asking "is there any chance of someone else doing this for
me", the answer is "not right now, and probably not for a while."
Patrick is quite busy with bug fixes and UI changes.  I, for one, would
much rather Patrick spend his time bringing Enigmail towards a 1.0
release than I would have him spend his time on features that have only
one vocal supporter.

If you are asking "I am willing to write this support, how do I get my
changes adopted by Enigmail", the following is a rough guideline:

1.  Write the code (easiest part).
    1a.  Write a requirements and design doc.  (Easy, but nobody seems
         to actually do it.)
    1b.  Document the code.  (Ditto.)
2.  Do regression testing to make sure you haven't broken any of
    Enigmail's existing functionality (hard, since we have no official
    regression test suite--we should look into that)
3.  Package your change up as an XPI and announce it on this mailing
    list.
4.  Early adopters and volunteers will begin to use your XPI.  They
    will discover a ton of bugs and edge cases you never thought of.
5.  Fix the bugs and edge cases.  Keep your XPI active and tracking
    the latest Enigmail for six months.
6.  Six months later, submit your changes to Patrick.  Also submit
    to him all outstanding bug tickets and known issues.  At this point
    you become Patrick's Very Favorite Person, since you will have
    submitted to him stable code with engineering documentation and a
    user community which supports it.
7.  If Patrick likes your code (very likely, if you do all of 1-6),
    Patrick may ask you to submit to him a change-of-copyright form
    transferring ownership of the code to him.  Some FOSS projects do
    this, some don't.
8.  Your code gets incorporated into Enigmail.  The rest of the
    Enigmail team will begin to change webpages, user documentation,
    UI, and every other thing imaginable needed to incorporate your
    code into Enigmail proper and form a polished product.

> I have asked for support of "X-PGP-Sig:" but I will be happy to use more
> general solution.

You asked for it in 2004 and were told by Patrick "I would be happy to
include it if someone wrote a patch".  You've asked for it again.  In
neither 2004 nor 2007 did X-PGP-Sig get "yeah, me too!"s from the
Enigmail community.  Also, in 2004 Patrick pointed out some serious
problems with the X-PGP-Sig protocol, problems which have not been fixed
in the last three years--which makes me think even the protocol authors
have abandoned it.

I think X-PGP-Sig is a dead letter at this point.

> [e.g. execute external program, feed it XML via its stdin, read XML it
> produces via stdout and error/report via stderr.

This sounds like a completely separate tool as opposed to part of Enigmail.

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