gnupg-users at gnupg.org

Robert J. Hansen rjh at sixdemonbag.org
Thu Jun 2 18:37:36 CEST 2022


> 1 What is the difference between gnupg2 and gnupg-2.X.X?

Possibly quite a lot.  GnuPG exists in three different branches.  For 
sake of simplicity I'll call them "modern", "standard", and "classic".

Modern: GnuPG 2.3 and later.
Standard: GnuPG 2.2
Classic: GnuPG 1.4

The differences among them are principally what version of the OpenPGP 
standard they track.  OpenPGP has been around for decades.  The Modern 
branch has some bells and whistles the other two lack (principally 
authenticated encryption, which *technically* exists in the other two, 
but the Modern branch does it in a technically superior way).

Standard and Classic are roughly equivalent in terms of features, but 
Standard exists to support desktop environments, while Classic may be 
more useful in standalone server environments.

We would like to see Classic go away and move everything to Modern, but 
that's not possible right now.  Maybe not ever.

> It is looking for gnupg2 but currently my compilation is as gnupg.

If you're downloading the 2.2 or 2.3 branches, you can set the 
executable name by passing a flag to ./configure.  I think it's 
"--program-suffix=2" will add a 2 to the end of all the binaries created 
by GnuPG.  Or, to just set the name of the gpg binary to gpg2, use 
"--enable-gpg-is-gpg2".

Hope this helps.  :)
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