GnuPG 2.0

[Sven Radde]

Hello!

John W. Moore III schrieb:
> The Bottom Line is that nothing is /missing/ in 1.4.x Builds.
Even if this was true, it is probably not wise to furnish Windows users
with an 'old' version of GnuPG. People may have the impression that it
is not maintained as well anymore. Obviously, this is a marketing
perspective (and may even be incorrect) but depending on the goals of
the GnuPG project, this point should not be overlooked. If you want to
reach end-users (I assume so), Windows still is *the* market and will
remain so for the foreseeable future. I'm not sure that "we will keep
maintaining 1.x because it's still useful" (GnuPG 2.0 announcement) is
the right message here.

Apart from this soft reason, a replacement for pageant (Putty's SSH
agent) that does support the OpenPGP smartcard is *definitely* something
I would want under Windows. :-) Also, not every GnuPG-GUI does
passphrase-caching (which is AFAIK a slightly different thing than what
the agent does, anyway).
Not so definite about S/MIME but would surely be nice to have as well
(sometimes, one may want to use it outside of a mailer program or just
have a central certificate storage independent of the mailer).
Developers will be more qualified to comment here, but I imagine that a
"well defined API" to manage the configuration would also be a nice
thing compared to the various rather ad-hoc (I think) methods currently
in use by the available GUIs. Same could be true for scdaemon and the
other development-focused features.

Summarizingly, I hope that there will be a Windows version.
If nothing else, there should be a clear commitment as to the future of
1.4.x (i.e. not only maintaining but active further development) to
avoid the feeling that Windows users have a "second class" GnuPG.

Just my 2 cents,
  Sven Radde