Status of GPA and GPGME

[Miguel Coca]

On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 18:15:22 -0400, David Shaw wrote:
> I think I was not clear enough.  What I meant was that the intent is
> to eventually have no built-in keyserver support in the gpg binary,
> and do all keyserver access through the external helper programs.

Ah, Ok.

> Currently, this plan is not complete: in 1.2, HKP is still in the gpg
> binary, but all other keyserver types (including LDAP) are external.
> There is already code for an external HKP handler, but it is not yet
> as good as the internal code (it is missing HTTP proxy support).

If I understood you, once we support one of the helpers, we support all of
them, right? So, there should be no problem if we released a GPA without HKP
support. Then, as soon as HKP was taken out of gpg, it would be added to the
list of supported protocols without much effort.

> That sounds reasonable, if it could be done in gpgme.  GnuPG has the
> same portability issue, so

Maybe it can be done easily in GPA, after all. I just found out that GLib
provides a portable way to create processes. Because GPA is a GTK+
application, it makes sense to use it.

So, where to put it is a design question. Maybe Marcus could say whether he
would like to have keyserver access in gpgme.

> the keyserver helper programs are all written to accept commands via a
> pipe or via a temp file.

Is that interface documented somewhere? Other than in the source, of course :-)

Cheers,
-- 
Miguel Coca                                         e970095@zipi.fi.upm.es
PGP Key 0x27FC3CA8                         http://zipi.fi.upm.es/~e970095/