Improving the command line UI of gpg

[Ben McGinnes]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 12:43:56PM +0200, Dirk Gottschalk via Gnupg-devel wrote:
> 
> Distributing wrapper scripts with gnupg is not a goof idea, they would
> have to be provided for any platform.

Right.

> That means as shell scipts for Linux/Unix, as batch file for windows
> and so an. Python would not be an option because it would generate a
> dependency on python, what, for example, means an additional
> installation for python on windows.

Actually this doesn't necessarily rule out Python in the long run, it
would just take a bit more effort on the part of the developer,
depending on whether you wanted an embedded Python that was shippeed
with the wrapper interface or whether you used a compiler type module
to generate platform specific binaries from your wrappers, as is often
done with PyInstaller and similar things.

Caveats: There are currently other runtime issues with the Python
bindings on Windows which are still under investigation; and the
bindings did not play nicely with PyInstaller at all the last time I
checked, mainly because PyInstaller can only really handle pure
Python, ctypes and (maybe) cffi.  I haven't checked all the
alternatives to PyInstaller either and generally an installation of
CPython is preferable anyway.

As for "problems" stemming from introducing Windows dependencies in
the form of installing Python.  I'd say there's a fair argument that
anyone seeking an alternative command line interface for GPG on
Windows probably wouldn't bat an eyelid at installing Python, would
probably already have GPGShell, Kleopatra and GPA installed and be
somewhat further ahead of relying merely on a collection of .bat
files.

Python as a dependency isn't actually the problem for Windows users,
the real issue for them is whether GPGME and GPG were compiled with
the same runtime as the version of Python they installed.  As for what
happens when those runtimes do match ... is pending confirmation.


Regards,
Ben
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