[pkg-gnupg-maint] package shuffling for the GnuPG suite in buster?

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Sun 2017-06-11 03:39:33 +0200, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> On Thu 2017-05-18 17:34:00 -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
>> It has bothered me for a while that we have packages named things like
>> "gnupg-agent" when the user-facing binary is named "gpg-agent" (and also
>> "gnupg" when the binary is "gpg").  Furthermore, most tools really want
>> to use gpgconf in some circumstances, but we don't have explicit
>> Dependencies on gpg, which is what provides /usr/bin/gpgconf.
>>
>> I'm inclined to try to clean this up in buster (stretch+1) so i was
>> wondering what people think about it.
>
> I haven't heard any negative feedback about this proposal yet, and i
> haven't come up with anything better, so i plan to go ahead and try to
> implement the proposal in experimental to try to get concrete feedback.

I've just uploaded 2.1.21-4 to experimental with a major reorganization
of the package (this skips 2.1.21-3, which was never uploaded to the
archive).  It ended up slightly different than originally planned, but i
think it's better :)

The package is currently pretty complicated, and it is specifically
complicated because of trying to support a minimalist installation for
those who don't want network access or secret key operations.

If we decide that's not what we want going forward, there is another
(radically different) option:

Alternate approach
------------------

lump everything from GnuPG into a single "gnupg" package -- including
gpg-agent, scdaemon, dirmngr, etc.  We'd leave gpgv (and
gpgv-{static,udeb,win32}) as separate packages to try to support
installer and debootstrap use cases, and we'd probably leave gnupg-l10n
separate because of the size savings it offers.  This would be a much
simpler source package, but it might result in binary dependencies that
are larger than most users want.

Feedback, followup
------------------

Please give this packaging a try if you have a chance.  The NEW queue
has been sluggish recently, so you might do better to build it from
source.  Please send followup if you have any testing or feedback that
you think would be useful to other people.

        --dkg