Are the two front ends different?

[Werner Koch]

Hi,

On Mon, 10 Jul 2000, Sam Roberts wrote:

> Why two, are the goals of Seahorse and GPA different? Just curious.

I guess I didn't wrote the announcement for GPA, so here is the reason
why we did it:

Seahorse, GnomePGP, gpgshell are well established programs and we
would like to use them.  However, there is huge demand for a graphical
frontend for MS-Windows and frankly that is primary goal of the
funding we received from the German government.

The "problem" with Seahorse is that it is GNOME based.  I considered to
write GNOME lib stubs, so that we can use Seahorse also for Windows -
but in the end I decided not to do that but work on a plain GTK+ based
implementation.  So the folks, who actually did GPA, wrote a GTK+
implementation which is expected to run on Unix *and* MS-Windows and
maybe on other platforms too.  We might add GNOME support later for
GPA but at this time we do not have enough resources to do so.

The goal of GPA is to create a simple graphical frontend for GnuPG for
the casual computer user - I am not sure whether we already fulfilled
this goal.  Another thing with GPA is that it is based on GPAPA which 
is a high-level library to access GnuPG much similiar to Michael
Roth's PGG project but not that complex. (You are probably not interested
in it but today I build the first working DLL version for W32 of it).
This library will also be used to enhance some MUAs.

GPA will be a GNU program, so we need some legal papers when working
on it :-(.  Afaik, Seahorse has no such requirments.  Helpers are
welcome for both projects.

Please feel free to direct further questions to gpa-devel@gnupg.org or 
respond here.


  Werner

-- 
Werner Koch				OpenPGP key 621CC013
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