I am not sure this a suitable to be on by default. This will cause a great amount of lost bitcoins because unsophisticated users are careless.
+1
This is fine living in a separate branch.
Being able to recompile a branch is a nice
barrier of entry for the tech. clueless.
This SHOULD be included in the default client. Reason being, it is incredibly useful for people who know how to use it, and not all of us know how to use linux or feel like spending hours on Windows attempting to compile the source with all of the dependencies.
Discluding a feature like this from anyone who doesn't know how to compile c code would be a terrible thing.
No it wouldn't.
If you're desperate enough for the feature and not smart enough to follow
a wiki explaining how to recompile it, you'll find a way by asking someone
to do it for you.
In the end very few percentage of the user base will do this and people
will prefer the 'official' client because it'll be perceived as more 'safe'.
Again: barrier of entry, which will lower the percentage of fools screwing
around with their wallet not realizing the giant security risk they expose
themselves to when manipulating private keys directly.
Don't get me wrong, I find the feature very useful. But in the same way
you don't hand out a loaded AK-47 to a 5 year old, this feature belongs
in a branch.
Would you walk out of your bank with a 1kg gold bar sticking out of your
pocket ? You can argue that you're a grown man and that decision belong
to you. Fair enough, but when you're allowed to do this and it jeopardizes
the entire bitcoin ecosystem ... I don't agree.
I guess we're all entitled to our own opinions.
And where is this wiki article you speak of? The only detailed compile instructions I've seen were posted on this forum, and involved MinGW and about 3 hrs of work downloading dependencies and waiting for things to compile. It worked, after I figured out why a couple of things weren't working.
I still have no clue what to do with a patch file either.
Also, I certainly don't want to have to spend another 3 hours recompiling bitcoin with the patch every time a new version comes out. That's just a waste of my time. It's a waste of everyone's time to have to compile their own client in order to import/export keys.
There are other, much better ways to deal with potential user incompetence. Have a checkbox with big red flashing text, saying "Are you sure you want to delete this key from your wallet? It is unrecoverable unless you have saved it safely elsewhere," and then a more detailed explanation beneath that.