Fwd: GnuPG maintainer wanted

[marco atzeri]

On 2/27/2012 4:26 PM, Charles Wilson wrote:
> On 2/27/2012 8:56 AM, marco atzeri wrote:
>> I will give a look.
>> Any preference between 1.4.12 and 2.0.18 ?
>
> I made an attempt about two years ago to port gnupg 2.x.  It has
> additional dependencies beyond those of 1.4.x, so I added all of those
> to the distro.
>
> However, I ran into a problem (related to pth/pthread support) such
> gnugp's analog to ssh-agent could not be queried, so you always had to
> type in your passphrase.  That was obviously unacceptable, so I didn't
> actually post my version of gnupg-2.x
>
> The problem was basically this:
>
> 1) gnupg requires threading support via pth, NOT pthreads. This is
> because the gnupg folks consider "real" threads to provide a larger
> "attack surface" for security -- too large to adequately secure on all
> supported platforms -- so they require the use of the pth library. (pth
> provides a pseudo-thread interface that "kinda" works like pthreads, but
> the "threads" are actually all cooperatively managed as part of a single
> "native" thread.)
>
> 2) The pth library doesn't/didn't work on cygwin because of missing
> support for pth+fork. In any case, pth needed support for a facility
> that was, at the time, missing from cygwin (standard posix
> sigstack/sigaltstack approach):
> http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2009-10/msg00467.html
> This was on cgf's post-1.7 TODO list, but I don't recall if it ever
> happened. If it did, then I have a "ported" pth package (un-ITP'ed) that
> should work.
>
> 3) So, I heavily patched gnupg to use pthreads instead. But this had a
> side effect that gpg-agent didn't work as expected. IIRC, this had
> (something) to do with cygwin's missing support for passing open file
> descriptors between threads (briefly mentioned on the main list last
> week; obviously passing open filedes between *pseudo-threads* that are
> actually part of the same *real* thread, as in pth, is not a problem. If
> we were actually using pth.
>
>
> I suspect, if (a) cygwin has sigstack/sigaltstack, and (b) my ported pth
> works ok, then a version of gnupg-2.x with my pthread patches reverted
> should be "almost there".
>
> --
> Chuck

Thanks for status,
I was just wondering why most of the dependencies
where present but a bit old.

I will leave (a) to cgf.

for the time being we stay with gnupg-1.4

Regards
Marco