Should GnuPG 1.4.x be revived?

David Woodhouse dwmw2 at infradead.org
Tue Jul 13 09:14:51 UTC 2010


On Tue, 2010-07-13 at 10:54 +0200, Karel Klic wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> several users of Emacs and one user of Vim complained in rhbz#574406 [1]
> that they can no longer use their editor to open and edit gpg-encrypted 
> files in Fedora 13.
> 
> The reason is that GnuPG 1.4 was deprecated after Fedora 12 release, and 
> GnuPG 2 was introduced to replace it. However, GnuPG 2 is not entirely 
> compatible with GnuPG 1.4.
> 
> I looked at GnuPG 2 and it seems that it would be very difficult to 
> modify Emacs and Vim to support it. GnuPG 2 does not allow to enter a 
> password using shell -- it needs entire terminal (as it uses ncurses 
> program pinentry-curses).
> Text editors can use only shell to send a password to GnuPG.
> 
> What about reviving GnuPG 1.4? It is maintained, secure, supported, and 
> its integration into text editors is used extensively and works well. It 
> can live alongside GnuPG 2.
> 
> What do you think? Any idea how to solve this issue?

It's a lot harder to add IDEA support for GnuPG 2, too. Although
hopefully that will no longer be an issue within a year or two.

-- 
dwmw2



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