[Announce] GnuPG 1.2.7 released

[Werner Koch]

Hello!
    
As promised in the announcement of GnuPG 1.4.0 [1], we are now pleased to
announce the availability GnuPG 1.2.7.

The GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) is GNU's tool for secure communication
and data storage.  It is a complete and free replacement of PGP and
can be used to encrypt data and to create digital signatures.  It
includes an advanced key management facility and is compliant with the
proposed OpenPGP Internet standard as described in RFC2440. 

This release merely fixes a few minor bugs and updates a few
translations.  It will be the last regular release of the 1.2.x series
as this series will enter *end of life status on January 1, 2005*, after
which it will only be updated for security critical bugs.  Please use
the stable 1.4.x series of GnuPG unless you have good reasons to keep
on using 1.2.x.



Getting the Software
====================

GnuPG 1.2.7 may be downloaded from one of the GnuPG mirror sites or
direct from ftp://ftp.gnupg.org/gcrypt .  The list of mirrors can be
found at http://www.gnupg.org/mirrors.html .  Note, that GnuPG is not
available at ftp.gnu.org.

On the mirrors you should find the following files in the *gnupg*
directory:

  gnupg-1.2.7.tar.bz2 (2.5M)
  gnupg-1.2.7.tar.bz2.sig

      GnuPG source compressed using BZIP2 and OpenPGP signature.

  gnupg-1.2.7.tar.gz (3.6M)
  gnupg-1.2.7.tar.gz.sig

      GnuPG source compressed using GZIP and OpenPGP signature.

  gnupg-1.2.6-1.2.7.diff.gz (296k)

      A patch file to upgrade a 1.2.6 GnuPG source. 

Select one of them. To shorten the download time, you probably want to
get the BZIP2 compressed file.  Please try another mirror if
exceptional your mirror is not yet up to date.

Note that there is no binary version for Windows because it is
suggested to switch over to 1.4.  On public demand we would provide a
windows versions, though.


Checking the Integrity
======================

In order to check that the version of GnuPG which you are going to
install is an original and unmodified one, you can do it in one of
the following ways:

 * If you already have a trusted version of GnuPG installed, you
   can simply check the supplied signature.  For example to check the
   signature of the file gnupg-1.2.7.tar.bz2 you would use this command:

     gpg --verify gnupg-1.2.7.tar.bz2.sig

   This checks whether the signature file matches the source file.
   You should see a message indicating that the signature is good and
   made by that signing key.  Make sure that you have the right key,
   either by checking the fingerprint of that key with other sources
   or by checking that the key has been signed by a trustworthy other
   key.  Note, that you can retrieve the signing key using "finger wk
   'at' g10code.com" or "finger dd9jn 'at' gnu.org" or using the
   keyservers.  I recently prolonged the expiration date; thus you
   might need a fresh copy of that key.

   Never use a GnuPG version you just downloaded to check the
   integrity of the source - use an existing GnuPG installation!

 * If you are not able to use an old version of GnuPG, you have to verify
   the SHA1 checksum.  Assuming you downloaded the file
   gnupg-1.2.7.tar.bz2, you would run the md5sum command like this:

     sha1sum gnupg-1.2.7.tar.bz2

   and check that the output matches the first line from the
   following list:

c8e47066e5bb61d74f4001b51117bf3a56a7dd3b  gnupg-1.2.7.tar.bz2
010f8b48bccea11831be316fe802eb0e43f4fcc3  gnupg-1.2.7.tar.gz
e2bf91f93b7292cb6aac5eb5acccceb623bc1652  gnupg-1.2.6-1.2.7.diff.gz


Upgrade Information
===================

If you are upgrading from a version prior to 1.0.7, you should run the
script tools/convert-from-106 once.  Please note also that due to a
bug in versions prior to 1.0.6 it may not be possible to downgrade to
such versions unless you apply the patch
http://www.gnupg.org/developer/gpg-woody-fix.txt .

If you have any problems, please see the FAQ and the mailing list
archive at http://lists.gnupg.org.  Please direct questions to the
gnupg-users at gnupg.org mailing list.


What's New
===========

Here is a list of major user visible changes since 1.2.6:

    * New "pgpgroup-to-gpggroup" script (in the tools directory) to
      convert from PGP 6 group syntax to GnuPG group syntax.

    * Translation update and minor bug fixes.


Internationalization
====================

GnuPG comes with support for 28 languages:

  American English         Indonesian (id)
  Bela-Russian (be)[*]     Italian (it)               
  Catalan (ca)             Japanese (ja)[*]
  Czech (cs)               Polish (pl)
  Danish (da)[*]           Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR)[*]
  Dutch (nl)               Portuguese (pt)[*]
  Esperanto (eo)[*]        Romanian (ro)
  Estonian (et)            Russian (ru)
  Finnish (fi)             Slovak (sk)
  French (fr)              Spanish (es)
  Galician (gl)[*]         Swedish (sv)
  German (de)              Traditional Chinese (zh_TW)[*] 
  Greek (el)               Simplified Chinese (zh_CN)                   
  Hungarian (hu)           Turkish (tr)             

Languages marked with [*] were not updated for this release and you
may notice untranslated messages. Many thanks to the translators for
their ongoing support of GnuPG.


A happy New Year,


  The GnuPG Team (David, Timo and Werner)



[1] http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-announce/2004q4/000186.html

-- 
Werner Koch                                      <wk at gnupg.org>
The GnuPG Experts                                http://g10code.com
Free Software Foundation Europe                  http://fsfeurope.org


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