Are smartcard patches for 2.1 helpful at this point in time?

Grant Olson kgo at grant-olson.net
Fri Jan 28 03:08:58 CET 2011


While I had a dev environment for gnupg set up, I thought I'd see if I
could run 2.1 beta on my machines.  It turns out there's still a lot of
issues with smartcards.  I think between the last announcement for the
beta, and some comments in the code, these are known issues and not
major surprises to anyone.

Issues I've noticed so far:

1) gpg --card-status doesn't generate the new format stub keys, but
running LEARN from gpg-connect-agent will.

2) Signing only works if you're using SHA1.  ( I do have a patch for this.)

3) Decrypting files doesn't seem to work.  It complains that I'm using
the wrong key.

I'm happy to invest some time working on these issues.  I've also got a
spare card, so I can test generating keys directly on the card,
migrating existing keys, and things like that.

But before I go too crazy I just wanted to make sure that (a) any
patches would be useful, (b) the codebase is in good enough shape for
them; there's no a major refactor on the way that'll invalidate them,
and (c) I'm not working in parallel with any official developers.  (Last
time I spent two days working on a fix for an open source project,
someone checked in basically the same code two hours before I generated
the patch file...)

-Grant

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