Thoughts on GnuPG and automation

[Robert J. Hansen]

> Different programming languages and operating systems can have very 
> different ways of launching and handling external processes.

Eh.  Different operating systems, sure: that's the nature of kernels.
They provide different syscalls, and that's at root how you launch an
external process -- by making syscalls.

But different programming languages can have very different ways of
launching and handling external processes?  I've never seen that to be
true.  C#'s Process, C's fork/exec, Python's subprocess, Go's
syscall.StartProcess()... it's all pretty much identical.  There are a
couple of exotics, but they're exotic.

> By forcing them all to launch GPG in the UNIX way makes for
> complicated and weird software.

It *can* make for complicated and weird software.  I don't doubt that
GnuPG doesn't fit well into the Android model, but this isn't a reason
to do GPGME differently.

If I'm Count Rugen, I'm not going to complain that glovemakers need to
change the way they do things to accommodate my six fingers.  I'm going
to acknowledge that my hands are quite a lot different from the
glovemakers' models, and rather than tell the glovemakers how
five-fingered gloves are a mistake because they don't account for the
possibility of six, I'm just going to hire a tailor to make my gloves.

(Count Rugen: the six-fingered villain from _The Princess Bride_.)