GnuPG 2.1 and Mailpile (LWN comments) about GPGME

[Robert J. Hansen]

> A good step forward would be the integration of language bindings
> into the gpgme package.

Not to beat a broken drum, but making it easier to use GPGME from a
Microsoft environment would also be nice.  MSVC++ needs a .lib file for
each DLL you're going to link against, and GPGME/Win32 doesn't ship with
one.  Although workarounds exist (making your own .lib file, dynamically
opening the DLL, etc.), it would be nice if GPGME could be released with
a .lib file.

I'm not particularly keen on Microsoft environments for a lot of
reasons.  However, they do have 85%-90% marketshare.  If our goal is
ideological purity, MS should be avoided; if our goal is to provide
privacy tools to the most people possible, we need to consider MS
environments to be a high priority.

> That should make it easier to use it from languages other than C, C++
> (, and CL).  However, someone needs to feel responsible for such a
> language binding and try to keep it up to date.

Given the announcement yesterday from MS about how they're opening up
the .NET server stack, I think we might see a resurgence of C# in the
UNIX space.  I have to say, it'd be really nice to see C# bindings for
GPGME.  There's already one set of them, gpgme-sharp, but I believe
they're unmaintained.