[pkg-gnupg-maint] Helping with GPGME and other components

[John Scott]

Hi,

Although I'm interested in helping with GnuPG-related packages in the long-term, I must confess that I'm scratching a particular itch owing to "shiny new stuff syndrome", that being adding support for gpgsm (using GPGME) to Poppler for PDF signing and verification. Formerly you would have had to import the certificate into Mozilla NSS (usually with Firefox) if you had it in a file, or import Scute as a PKCS #11 module in NSS if you're using a token. The new backend requires GPGME in experimental, but I can say that it seems to be working wonderfully. It's even indicated that GnuPG >= 2.2.42 like that in unstable should work, but I haven't tested this just yet.

My merge request for Poppler at https://salsa.debian.org/freedesktop-team/poppler/-/merge_requests/16 does little more than turn the feature on, but a time frame for when an adequate GPGME might land in unstable would help us plan. Could we make it happen for Trixie, and if so, what needs to happen before then? Note that coincidentally Poppler started its transition today, so all of this can be done at a leisurely pace.

It's much more daunting, obviously, but if I want to help GnuPG 2.4 get into shape, what are the most essential things to be working on? I'm concerned about the consequences of deferring the migration longer. Here's what I'm good at and where I might help if nothing more pressing arises:
 • I'm comfortable writing DEP-8 autopkgtests and think I could make some creative ones. I'm going to rewrite my https://salsa.debian.org/debian/gnupg2/-/merge_requests/11 (setting up an LDAP server and checking that gpgsm can get certificates from it) in the coming days.
 • I also frequently wrangle with (cross) toolchains on the packages I maintain and could look into improvements to the MinGW-w64 package. Fortunately it looks like we have a Wine-based autopkgtest for that already, which was going to be my next idea.

Let me know how I can help.

Thanks,
John
-- 
🌐 Homepage https://johnscott.me
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