GnuPG 2.1 and Mailpile (LWN comments) about GPGME

[Nicholas Cole]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 2:21 PM, Bernhard Reiter <bernhard at intevation.de> wrote:
> In https://www.mailpile.is/blog/2014-10-07_Some_Thoughts_on_GnuPG.html
> the Mailpile developers would like to replace GnuPG with something better
> and for the short term propose to extend GnuPG with a command line JSON
> interface in the short term.
>
> I've commented the article under the LWN news about GnuPG 2.1.0 release
> https://lwn.net/Articles/619337/ as following:

I actually disagree with the assumption here.  The --with-colons
--command-fd --status-fd interface has been remarkably stable.  The
last major incompatible change was in 1.4.9 and 2.0.11 when the order
in which subkey algorithms were presented was changed.  Other than
that, it is an incredibly well-designed an easy to parse interface.
The only way in which it can trip you up is that you need to keep a
careful watch on whether you are expecting further data from gpg or
not.

The stability and utility of this interface is one of my favourite
aspects of the gnupg project, and I really admire Werner for his work
here.

Nicholas