Ann: Ägypten developments

Dear KDE-PIM and Gnu Privacy Assistance Developers,

as you may have noticed, there is a lot of acitivity going on
for Ägypten (S/MIME for KMail and Mutt).

The reason is that the group behind the first Ägypten project
got another contract, Codename Ägypten2.
The group is formed again of the companies g10 Code,
Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB (KDAB) and Intevation.

Our mission is to maintain and extend the Ägypten implementation
according to the needs of our customer (the BSI again).
That is the Free Software SPHINX conformant S/MIME Email system.

The plan is to improve the KMail User Interface (ie. Usability),
add some features such as OCSP for CRLs and fix bugs.
Consolidation of the Crypto-backend and KMail/CertManager
is a natural part of this project.
Work started in December 2003 and we aim to be finished by
summer 2004.

The GUI side is coordinated by Marc Mutz from KDAB.
Ägypten2 development is done based on KDE 3.2 and hopefully major
parts will already be integrated in the KDE-PIM 3.3 release.

The Crypto side is done by Werner Koch of g10 Code.
Ägypten2 is incorporated into GnuPG 1.9.x which will eventually
become GnuPG 2.0 thus integrating OpenPGP and S/MIME support.
Work is also done on the other modules (dirmngr, pinentry, ...).
For systematic configuration, there is a new module called GpgConf.
Its main feature is to interface with GUIs nicely
so they can configure all the components of the GnuPG crypto system.

The overall coordination is subject to my responsibility.

We are in the lucky position that we can work in the open
and contribute all our work back into the main development lines.
Provided they are approved by the developer communities. 
We already coordinated with some maintainers
and we expect a good benefit for the involved Free Software
from Ägypten2.

This announcement addresses the developer communities. We would
like to get the work done first before bringing this to the press.

Let us know any questions and other comments.

All the best

	Jan

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