[OTR-users] OTR key storage

[Tamme Schichler]

Hello,

Am 11.09.2013 15:06, schrieb subharo at hushmail.com:
 >
> I personally cringe about the C# idea, as the linux community would
> probably not dig using any solution that makes use of C# or its
> related build tools (even if that code is not used on a Linux
> system).  Using C# also might make things tougher for when the day
> comes to make this solution work on other non-Microsoft OS's, which
> are not linux (and don't come with Python pre-installed).

I was not suggesting to use C#, just mentioning it for comparison :) 
Mono is somewhat common by now I think, but it's nowhere near practical 
for a dependency.

> I also think we shouldn't care about saving a few MB here and there
> when people do downloads of this proposed solution.  Even if our
> solution caused a 20 MB extra download, I, for one, would not
> hesitate to download it, for the tremendous and **timely** value it
> brings to have the greatly-increased security of OTR.  Even $35
> Raspberry Pi's can easily spare that kind of disk space.
>
> Bandwidth and disk space are very cheap these days.  These days,
> most people are downloading "view-once-then-discard" data (like
> much-larger Youtube videos, MP3 podcasts, and torrents) left, right
> and centre, not caring about bandwidth or disk space.

Keep in mind that our target audience are not the end-users. If I was 
managing an application I would think twice before doubling or tripling 
the installer size (and serving costs for that file).

Putting it bluntly, OTR is not a core feature for many users right now 
either, due to its low spread. Most people likely just want a fast, 
lightweight IM client and a large download size probably leaves the 
opposite impression. I don't have any data on this though.

That said, I found a freezing tool for Python 3.3[1], so we can use any 
stable Python version and still get a small redistributable. In case 
that doesn't work there's always the option to ship with a Python 
interpreter and partial standard library.

I disagree about bandwidth being cheap. It's true in most of Europe, but 
in the USA there are low data caps with no alternatives in some areas. I 
recently read somewhere that broadband is very costly in most of Asia 
but can't find the source at the moment.

[1]: http://cx-freeze.sourceforge.net/

-Tamme