FAQ, take two

Kevin Kammer Lists.gnupg at mephisto.fastmail.net
Mon Jun 4 21:35:49 CEST 2012


On Mon, Jun 04, 2012 at 02:08:52PM -0400 Also sprach Robert J. Hansen:
> On 6/4/12 12:35 PM, Kevin Kammer wrote:
> > Section 2.6:  For Solaris 11, gnupg is also available via the default
> > IPS publisher.  The version Oracle provides is 2.0.17 vs 2.0.18 from
> > OpenCSW, but it is worth mentioning as it may satisfy parties who are
> > unwilling (or unable) to install via 3rd-party software sources.
> 
> I am unfortunately Solaris-impaired: IPS publisher?  If you could
> provide a sentence or two explaining this (preferably in the same
> general format/wording as the other sections), I'd appreciate it greatly.
> 

IPS is the "Image Packaging System," or simply, the new way that
Solaris 11 is managing software distribution.  In IPS-speak, a
"publisher" is what might be the equivalent of a Linux repository.
Solaris 11 installs the default publisher, pkg.oracle.com, which
offers GnuPG 2.0.17 as of this writing.  That is to say, GnuPG is in
the repo, though I'm not sure if it's installed by default or not.
However, to install it, one would type (as root, or equivalent):

pkg install gnupg

So, as you can see, "pkg" is the IPS equivalent of "yum" or "apt-get"
or what have you.

I would write "a sentence or two explaining this (preferably in the
same general format/wording as the other sections)," but upon review
of your recent edits to the FAQ, what you have there now looks at
least as consistent in detail as the comments for the other OSes, so I
would just leave it as it is.  You might want to explicitly state that
OpenCSW also works with Solaris 10 (and earlier?), since the bullet
item begins with "Solaris 11" and makes no mention of other versions.

> > Section 4.11  Should almost certainly mention GnuPG integration with
> > Evolution, which is still the default Gnome email client on many *nix
> > distros.
> 
> D'oh, yes.  Although I don't know if they support inline signatures yet.
>  I know they support PGP/MIME (rather obsessively) and that inline
> signatures have been a requested feature, but I'd need someone to
> confirm the status there -- as well as whether it supports GnuPG 1.4 or 2.0.
> 

While trying to find answers to these questions via the Gnome
Evolution online documentation, I failed to find any useful answers,
but I did find the following, misleading information at 
http://library.gnome.org/users/evolution/stable/mail-encryption-gpg-create-key.html.en

"Key servers store your public keys for you so that your friends can
decrypt your messages."

Yikes!  That's not what they're for at all!  At least, that's not how
I would have phrased it--it sounds like putting your public keys on a
keyserver exposes all your encrypted messages to decryption, or am I
just reading that strangely?  Maybe while we're in the process of
updating documentation, someone should file a bug report against that
page (assuming I'm not crazy).

Oh, and I do have access to a very recent Evolution when I get home,
so I suppose I can check these things out (inline signing and GnuPG
version compatibility) when I get there.



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