GSoC project idea

Doron Behar doron.behar at gmail.com
Mon Mar 18 12:21:27 CET 2019


Hello Dashamir,

Thanks for showing your interest in this idea. I thought more about it
after I've sent the email to the mailing list and I reached the
conclusion that it might be more efficient to _fork_ the existing
code-base and use the same existing functions and only bind them to a
different executable that will have a different use of argparse.
Actually, I've already created a prototype of this and the missing work
to be done is connecting everything to the already existing functions
available in the code-base.

It is indeed a good project for a student. Only I'm not sure I'll be
able to do it myself, although my motivation is rather high. I'm
preparing myself for the 1st year of Computer Science studies in
university these days so I don't have a lot of spare time.

On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 06:13:32PM +0100, Dashamir Hoxha wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Last year we discussed a request/proposal for improving the command line UI
> of gnupg:
> https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-devel/2018-July/033857.html
> 
> We decided that making radical changes to the current UI of gnupg is a huge
> task, risky, unfeasible, and in general not worth the trouble.
> 
> However I came up with a proposal for writing just a wrapper to the current
> gpg command, that organizes the commands and options in a different way,
> presumably more easy and intuitive. This wrapper will not affect in no way
> the gpg command itself, it will be just like "syntactic sugar", and in the
> end it will call the gpg command itself, with the proper arguments and
> options.
> 
> This wrapper can be written in Bash, Python, Go, etc. It should be very
> easy to develop such a wrapper, assuming that we already know all the
> details about the commands and options of gnupg, and we have a clear idea
> about the new system of commands and options that we want to build. This
> new system of commands and options doesn't have to cover 100% of the
> functionality of the gpg command; for the few things that may remain
> unimplemented the user may use the gpg command directly.
> 
> I think this is suitable task for a GSoC project that can be developed in
> 2-3 months by a good student, with help and guidance from mentors. It can
> be submitted to GNU, which acts as an ombrella organization on GSoC for all
> the gnu projects:
> https://www.gnu.org/software/soc-projects/ideas-2019.html
> I think it is worth a try, there is nothing to risk or to loose.
> 
> Anybody interested or willing to be a mentor for this project? I might be a
> mentor as well, if needed, since I do have some mentoring experience from
> the last year GSoC.
> 
> Regards,
> Dashamir



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