Geändert: 19. 6. 2011, 10:43
Who needs oracles
Paul recently wrote about oracles. I think it's time to say something about them as it touches me in two ways.
First, most of the things you would get from this is at least wrong for some KDE modules. When you build that oracle for KGpg you will find some connections. But looking back at the last two years or so I only remember one recent commit from Burkhard that was the result of collaboration. All other commits not by me I can remember of were just fire&forget commits for general cleanups like making KDE* compile with yet another Qt flag.
The other thing that came to mind is where I actually are connected to someone ;) For the web of trust created by GPG signed keys there are sites like PGP pathfinder & key statistics (e.g. statistics for my key) that do this sort of oracles regularly. This sort of "oracle" has actually some practical meaning. While the rank within the web is practically useless and only to please someones ego, the analysis itself is indeed useful. The idea is to show if there are possible paths from you to other keys. This is the pathfinder thing I started to implement and never finished.