gpg 1.4

[Robert J. Hansen]

> Their proposed cure is besides the point; the
> population of users we are considering can pick up devices
> that will run 1.4 air-gaped and do everything they need
> to do from any consumer electronics recycling bin.

Which segment of users are these?

That's not a sarcastic question. It's a sincere one.

I spent almost twenty years working on Enigmail, in order to persuade 
Mozilla to incorporate OpenPGP support into Thunderbird. (We ultimately 
succeeded, which is why we're no more.) During those twenty years, the 
hardest and most surprising lesson we learned was that we had absolutely 
no idea who our users were.

We had message boards, forums, an email help team, you could even report 
bugs right from the GUI. By keeping track of the forums and mailing 
lists and everything else we thought we had a good view on what our 
users wanted.

Then I attended Circumvention (aka Internet Freedom Fest #0; they 
renamed it to IFF the next year) and actually met the people who were 
using Enigmail in the field. They weren't on our forums, didn't get 
involved in our mailing lists. They just wanted things to work and 
didn't want to waste time tweaking configuration files. These people had 
a much different vision of what Enigmail should be and could be.

We ultimately decided to pivot a bit to (a) go out into the field to 
find our users, and (b) weigh what our real users wanted more than what 
the forum-posting users wanted. It made a huge difference in our 
priorities, and I'm convinced it's a large part of the reason why just a 
few years after making this pivot Mozilla decided we were right and 
OpenPGP should be supported natively.

I understand you represent a certain fraction of the userbase. There's 
nothing wrong with being in that fraction. However, I think you are 
probably massively overestimating how big your fraction is, or the 
degree to which your fraction's desires should be guiding GnuPG development.

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