When to use GPG flags

[Eric Pruitt]

On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 12:28:44PM +0100, Peter Lebbing wrote:
> For programmatic use of GnuPG, you should really be using a library,
> preferably GPGME. That is the supported way of using GnuPG from another
> program. Calling the gpg command line program directly is for use by
> humans on a command line.

As a human, this behavior is surprising and unintuitive. I use GPG
outside of email clients more often than not. I typically use
"--encrypt", "--decrypt" and any other flags I think are necessary, but
it seems like I don't actually need to bother doing that. Regardless of
how I ultimately choose to implement PGP support in my mail client, I
would still like to have the questions I asked addressed to understand
how GPG handles command line flags.

Eric