[Mailman-Developers] GSoC Updates

[Barry Warsaw]

I agree with everything written elsewhere by Steve and Richard.

On Aug 14, 2013, at 05:35 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>[1]  Has anybody else noticed that both gpg's UI and its documentation
>seem designed to make it as hard to use as possible?

Sadly, I think this is one of the biggest reasons why we've never seen
widespread adoption of signatures and encryption in email.  I'll ignore
nefarious reasons like authors of MUAs-for-the-masses in deliberate collusion
to make it difficult for the non-Snowdens of the world.

In any case, I've always heard that gpg deliberately does not expose a
programmable API that e.g. could be wrapped by Python.  They only provide a
command line API because they think that's the best way to avoid incorrect use
in language bindings.  They're probably not wrong about that.  In any case,
tools like python-gnupg are essentially glorified subprocess wrappers around
the gpg cli, because there's no other way to do it.

-Barry