The release of GNU Privacy Guard version 2.0.0 [LWN.net]

GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) is an open-source encryption utility that was started in 1997 as a replacement for the commercial application PGP. GnuPG runs on a wide variety of operating system platforms.

GnuPG is the GNU project's complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC2440. GnuPG allows to encrypt and sign your data and communication, features a versatile key manag[e]ment system as well as access modules for all kind of public key directories. GnuPG, also known as GPG, is a command line tool with features for easy integration with other applications. A wealth of frontend applications and libraries are available.

[GnuPG] Stable version 2.0.0 of GnuPG has been announced, it represents an architectural design fork for the project.

GnuPG-2 has a different architecture than GnuPG-1 (e.g. 1.4.5) in that it splits up functionality into several modules. However, both versions may be installed alongside without any conflict. In fact, the gpg version from GnuPG-1 is able to make use of the gpg-agent as included in GnuPG-2 and allows for seamless passphrase caching. The advantage of GnuPG-1 is its smaller size and the lack of dependency on other modules at run and build time. We will keep maintaining GnuPG-1 versions because they are very useful for small systems and for server based applications requiring only OpenPGP support.

New features in GnuPG version 2 include:

A gpg-agent daemon for maintaining private keys and a passphrase cache.
A new implementation of the S/MIME protocol via the gpgsm command line tool.
The scdaemon daemon for accessing smart cards.
The gpg-connect-agent tool, which allows scripts to access gpg-agent and scdaemon services.
The gpgconf tool for maintaining configuration files.
Support for the Dirmngr server, which manages certificate revocation lists and more.
Secure Shell Agent protocol support and built-in ssh-agent capabilities.
The addition of smart card support to the Secure Shell.
Improved documentation.

The GnuPG project has succeeded in filling an important space in the open-source tool collection. The release of version 2 shows that the project is moving forward with the addition of a lot of new functionality.

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The release of GNU Privacy Guard version 2.0.0

Posted Nov 16, 2006 11:10 UTC (Thu) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link]

Wow. V1.2.4 already had 39 different commandline actions and 46 commandline options. That's quite a few combinations to test and debug, now 2.0 adds another slew. It would be interesting to hear a bit about the software development approach, e.g. what was found to be good/bad in the v1 code re structure / maintainability / testability / inspectability, and what was changed in that regard dor the v2 fork.

The release of GNU Privacy Guard version 2.0.0

Posted Nov 16, 2006 13:44 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]

Also keep in mind that GPG 1.x has something like 200 different command line switches, that the man page is about 60 pages long, that several switches are only documented with descriptions like 'This is not for normal use. Use the source to see for what it might be useful.' or 'This is an obsolete option and is not used anywhere.', and you get a program this is... still easier to use than Emacs.

I kid, I kid.