GPGDisk campaign

[Robert J. Hansen]

Jørgen Lysdal wrote:
> lol, very cool with the steganography thing...

I'll be the bad guy and rain on the parade, and give the reasons why
this is very unlikely to come to pass.


0.  It is not what GnuPG targets.

GnuPG tracks conformance to RFC2440, the OpenPGP standard, and
implements additional parts (smartcard drivers, etc.) as needed to give
a good user experience for RFC2440 tasks.  A cryptographic file system
has no relation to RFC2440.  Why should GnuPG support it?


1.  There are no standards for cryptographic file systems.

GnuPG has always focused on conformance to standards.  The GnuPG
developers probably do not want to come out with yet another
incompatible file system.


2.  There already exist strong Free Software implementations.

On UNIX there are many different Free Software encrypted file systems,
from encrypted loopback devices to plug-ins for the ReiserFS file system
to TrueCrypt (Linux only) to... etcetera.  On Windows, TrueCrypt offers
good support for encrypted partitions, much in the same way PGPDisk does
today.


3.  The GnuPG developers may not find it sexy.

Writing good software is work.  It's a hell of a lot of work, in fact.
The thing that gets most Free Software developers going is their
affection for the subject matter.  The GnuPG developers like getting
their hands dirty with Internet wire protocols like OpenPGP.  Do they
like getting their hands dirty with filesystem drivers?  I don't know,
but my guess is no.


... And, of course, the short version of it is this: if you want it done
that badly, then grab the source and hack it yourself.  It's GPLed for
exactly that reason.