Thoughts on GnuPG and automation

[Hans of Guardian]

On Mar 3, 2015, at 5:49 PM, Robert J. Hansen wrote:

>> Different programming languages and operating systems can have very 
>> different ways of launching and handling external processes.
> 
> Eh.  Different operating systems, sure: that's the nature of kernels.
> They provide different syscalls, and that's at root how you launch an
> external process -- by making syscalls.
> 
> But different programming languages can have very different ways of
> launching and handling external processes?  I've never seen that to be
> true.  C#'s Process, C's fork/exec, Python's subprocess, Go's
> syscall.StartProcess()... it's all pretty much identical.  There are a
> couple of exotics, but they're exotic.
> 
>> By forcing them all to launch GPG in the UNIX way makes for
>> complicated and weird software.
> 
> It *can* make for complicated and weird software.  I don't doubt that
> GnuPG doesn't fit well into the Android model, but this isn't a reason
> to do GPGME differently.
> 
> If I'm Count Rugen, I'm not going to complain that glovemakers need to
> change the way they do things to accommodate my six fingers.  I'm going
> to acknowledge that my hands are quite a lot different from the
> glovemakers' models, and rather than tell the glovemakers how
> five-fingered gloves are a mistake because they don't account for the
> possibility of six, I'm just going to hire a tailor to make my gloves.
> 
> (Count Rugen: the six-fingered villain from _The Princess Bride_.)

Android has an installed base of hundreds of millions.  Desktop UNIX is the exotic system here as compared to Windows, Android, etc.

.hc