janlelis
commented
11 years ago Hey mkaito,
thank you for your input. As you've mention, doing backups is no problem. However, I am not sure if it is a good idea to have an export feature. On one hand, I can see you point about being able to somehow transfer all the data into another system. On the other hand, it is a kind of dangerous feature, since it would take all passwords at once (and probably store them in a decrypted file) with only one active action. Somehow I dislike this possibility. It's like taking the sercret phonebook out of the safe and putting it on the table.
To be clear, it does not matter from the cryptographic standpoint at all. It's only about what the pws rubygem is able to do with the password file. And one could also argue that it doesn't matter at all, since the current implementation gets all passwords at once, anyway, it just doesn't give you all at once on the command-line...
By the way, this feature is not hard to implement - Since I currently don't have any plans to do it, you could just try to implement it yourself! Even better would be to directly convert your passwords to another encrypted file format.
By the way, 2: There will be more platform support soon!
mkaito
Storing your passwords safely is fine and dandy, but you definitely want to be able to export and/or back up your safe properly. While checking your safe files into whatever backup system you use might be fine, I'd still be more comfortable if I was able to export everything into a human readable format, in case I decide to no longer use pws, or if I have to access my stuff on a system that's unable to run pws.