Perl interface to GnuPG functionality

[sen_ml at eccosys.com]

At around Fri, 21 Aug 1998 09:55:32 -0400,
 Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell at calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca> may have mentioned:

> In message <199808211041.MAA00437 at quill>, Norbert Bollow writes:
> >Greetings!
> >
> >Does anyone have plans for a Perl module which would offer the
> >functionality of gpg? I'm not thinking of something which would
> >run the gpg executable, but a "Perl extension" which makes use
> >of the C code directly.
> 
> I really don't understand what you mean here.  The perl program would _not_
> run gpg, is that correct?
> 
> If so, I don't get it.  Are you talking about writing gpg in perl or what?

he is talking about wanting to call gpg code from perl -- there is a
way to provide access to functionality provided via c code inside
perl.  

here is a rough explanation of the process:

one creates glue code between the c source code and perl.  this
usually manifests itself in the form of a 'module'.  once the module
is included/ loaded (w/ something like 'use'), you can make perl
function calls which are translated (along w/ arguments) into c -- the
c code is then called and the results are translated back into perl.

this is possible in both perl and python (probably other
languages as well).  IIRC, there's also a package called swig
that facilitates this process somewhat independent of language --
though it tends to work better for fairly simple interfaces.

if there were a gpg library, this would probably (first impression) be
fairly easy to do -- get something working anyway...making it fairly
secure might be quite a bit of work.  it's possible to do this w/o a
library interface but imho, it's likely to become much more messy and
harder to maintain as the original software develops.

does this make any sense?

-sen