Key madness!

Just got done moving some encryption keys around and I am ornery and tired at all of the silliness going on between all of the encryption toolkits out there. Gnupg and seahorse (the gnome frontend) don't recognize ssh keys even to import them, even though installing ssh keys is a feature of the seahorse program. OpenSSL talks to everything as far as I can tell, but still requires a ton of conversions and switches to do almost anything. It's like before the days of universal image editors when they each could only handle their own wierd binary bitmap formats. Today we are not only used to being able to say "save" and "open" directly, but we are used to cut and paste between compatible editors.

I understand if there is trouble recognizing the odd encryption certificate format or two, but most of these things are clear as day and have headers and everything. Let's get to the point where gpg and openssl recognize and offer to convert one another's formats at least, prompting you along the way if you are going from a cert to a key or need a passphrase or whatever. Or hell, just spit out a message saying, "this looks like X or Y format. You can export from X format to my format using the following commands" Job done.

I don't know if the GNU - BSD rivalry has something to do with this silliness, but until this page is a lot shorter, we're doing it wrong.