Thoughts on GnuPG and automation

[Hans of Guardian]

On Mar 3, 2015, at 7:09 PM, Peter Lebbing wrote:

> On 03/03/15 18:29, Hans of Guardian wrote:
>> Android has an installed base of hundreds of millions.  Desktop UNIX
>> is the exotic system here as compared to Windows, Android, etc.
> 
> I have no idea about how difficult it is to launch the gpg binary with a
> few pipes attached to a few file descriptors and perhaps anything else
> you need.
> 
> But I fail to see why you brought it up.
> 
> I thought we were discussing two alternatives:
> 
> - Call gpg directly
> - Use a library such as GPGME that calls gpg for you
> 
> In both cases, the gpg binary is executed as a separate process. So it
> seems to me any issues with this are the same in both cases. In fact, if
> it indeed is tricky as you say, you're better off if you have a library
> do this for you, so you don't have to get it right in each and every
> application.
> 
> Peter.

In Android, you can't really have shared libraries.  Apps share functionality at a higher level (aka Activities and Services).  So GnuPG-for-Android _is_ the shared library in effect, since it provides OpenPGP via Activities.

No one is saying that each app should have a custom wrapper for GnuPG.  What I think mailpile is saying, and what I'm trying to say is that for programming environments where GPGME does not make sense, there should be the ability to easily make a native version of what GPGME is doing.

.hc