Short History

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#+TITLE: A Short History of gpg bindings for Python
In 2002 John Goerzen released PyME; Python bindings for the GPGME module
which utilised the current release of Python of the time (Python 2.2 or
2.3) and SWIG. Shortly after creating it and ensuring it worked he
stopped supporting it, though left his work available on his Gopher
site.
A couple of years later the project was picked up by Igor Belyi and
actively developed and maintained by him from 2004 to 2008. Igor's
whereabouts at the time of this document's creation are unknown, but the
current authors do hope he is well. We're assuming (or hoping) that life
did what life does and made continuing untenable.
In 2014 Martin Albrecht wanted to patch a bug in the PyME code and
discovered the absence of Igor. Following a discussion on the PyME
mailing list he became the new maintainer for PyME, releasing version
0.9.0 in May of that year. He remains the maintainer of the original
PyME release in Python 2.6 and 2.7 (available via PyPI).
In 2015 Ben McGinnes approached Martin about a Python 3 version, while
investigating how complex a task this would be the task ended up being
completed. A subsequent discussion with Werner Koch led to the decision
to fold the Python 3 port back into the original GPGME release in the
languages subdirectory for non-C bindings. Ben is the maintainer of the
Python 3 port within GPGME.
In 2016 PyME was renamed to "gpg" and adopted by the upstream GnuPG
team.
* The Annoyances of Git
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: the-annoyances-of-git
:END:
As anyone who has ever worked with git knows, submodules are horrible
way to deal with pretty much anything. In the interests of avoiding
migraines, that is being skipped with addition of PyME to GPGME. Instead
the files will be added to the subdirectory, along with a copy of the
entire git log up to that point as a separate file within the docs
directory (old-commits.log). As the log for PyME is nearly 100KB and the
log for GPGME is approximately 1MB, this would cause considerable bloat,
as well as some confusion, should the two be merged. Hence the
unfortunate, but necessary, step to simply move the files. A regular
repository version will be maintained should it be possible to implement
this better in the future.
* The Perils of PyPI
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: the-perils-of-pypi
:END:
At the current time the Python 3 fork is not available via PyPI and the
pip installer. The recommended installation method is to follow the
instructions in lang/py3-pyme/INSTALL. This will build the necessary
SWIG portions against the installed version of GPGME.