[Pkg-gnupg-maint] upcoming libassuan, gpgme, dirmngr, gnupg 2.1, gpa

[Marcus Brinkmann]

Hi Debian libassuan, gpgme, dirmngr, gnupg2 and gpa maintainers,

I'd like to tell you what our upstream plans are for the upcoming gnupg 2.1
set of tools and talk about how to best support you in integrating them in Debian.

The upcoming version of libassuan (2.0.0) will build as a shared library.
This shared library will be required for the next release of gpgme, dirmngr
and gnupg2, which will link dynamically to libassuan.  The static version of
libassuan is not used anymore.  Pinentry will continue to ship its own
(minimal) version of libassuan that is linked statically.

It seems to us that it is best if libassuan makes it in before the upcoming
freeze, but this may be a tight schedule.  What do you think?

GNU Pth is another dependency of gnupg2, dirmngr and optionally gpgme (to my
knowledge, nothing really uses libgpgme-pth, so this could also be removed).
Pth is currently fully functional and essentially bug-free, but orphaned.  Our
current plan is to adopt Debian maintainership of pth (I would become the
maintainer, and awake from emeritus status for that), just to make sure that
the whole stack is in order and attended for.  If you have or prefer
alternatives, please let me know.

The next version of GPA also depends on the new shared version of libassuan.

Let me also thank you for attending to gnupg2 and related packages in the
past.  I know it hasn't always been easy, as gnupg2 is a totally different
beast than gnupg1, and involves many more components and dependencies at
compile and run time.  But now with libassuan finally becoming a shared
library, I think that the core infrastructure of the new setup is being completed.

Thanks,
Marcus

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