.. _maintenance-mode:

Maintenance Mode from 2019

==========================

+-----------------+------------------------------------------+

| Version:        | 0.0.1                                    |

+-----------------+------------------------------------------+

| GPGME Version:  | 1.13.0                                   |

+-----------------+------------------------------------------+

| Author:         | Ben McGinnes <ben@gnupg.org>             |

+-----------------+------------------------------------------+

| Author GPG Key: | DB4724E6FA4286C92B4E55C4321E4E2373590E5D |

+-----------------+------------------------------------------+

| Language:       | Australian English, British English      |

+-----------------+------------------------------------------+

| xml:lang:       | en-AU, en-GB, en                         |

+-----------------+------------------------------------------+

From the beginning of 2019 the Python bindings to GPGME will enter

maintenance mode, meaning that new features will not be added and only

bug fixes and security fixes will be made. This also means that

documentation beyond that existing at the end of 2018 will not be

developed further except to correct errors.

Though use of these bindings appears to have been quite well received,

there has been no indication of what demand there is, if any for either

financial backing of the current Python bindings development or support

contracts with g10code GmbH citing the necessity of including the

bindings.

.. _maintenance-mode-bm:

Maintainer from 2019 onward

---------------------------

How does this affect the position of GnuPG Python Bindings Maintainer?

Well, I will remain as maintainer of the bindings; but without funding

for that position, the amount of time I will be able to dedicate solely

to this task will be limited and reduced to volunteered time. As with

all volunteered time and effort in free software projects, this will be

subject to numerous external imperatives.

.. _maintenance-mode-blade-runner:

Using the Python Bindings from 2019 and beyond

----------------------------------------------

For most, if not all, Python developers using these bindings; they will

continue to "just work" the same as they always have. Expansions of

GPGME itself are usually handled by SWIG with the existing code and thus

bindings are generated properly when the bindings are installed

alongside GPGME and when the latter is built from source.

In the rare circumstances where that is not enough to address some new

addition to GPGME, then that is a bug and thus subject to the

maintenance mode provisions (i.e. it will be fixed following a bug

report being raised and your humble author will need to remember where

the timesheet template was filed, depending on how many years off such

an event is).

All the GPGME functionality will continue to be accessible via the lower

level, dynamically generated methods which match the GPGME C

documentation. While the more intuitively Pythonic higher level layer

already covers the vast majority of functionality people require with

key generation, signatures, certifications (key signing), encryption,

decryption, verification, validation, trust levels and so on.

Any wanted features lacking in the Python bindings are usually lacking

because they are missing from GPGME itself (e.g. revoking keys via the

API) and in such cases they are usually deliberately excluded. More

discussion of these issues can be found in the archives of the

`gnupg-devel mailing

list <https://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-devel>`__.

Any features existing in the dynamically generated layer for which

people want a specific, higher level function included to make it more

Pythonic (e.g. to avoid needing to learn or memorise cryptographic mode

values or GnuPG status code numbers), would be a feature request and

*not* a bug.

It is still worthwhile requesting it, but the addition of such a feature

would not be guaranteed and provided on a purely volunteer basis.

Expediting such a request would require funding that request.

Those with a commercial interest in expediting such a feature request

already know how to `expedite

it <https://gnupg.org/cgi-bin/procdonate.cgi?mode=preset>`__ (use the

message field to state what feature is being requested).

.. _docs:

Documentation formats

---------------------

The documentation has been written in Org mode for GNU Emacs, with both

Texinfo and reStructuredText formats generated from that. The Texinfo

files are intended for use with the rest of the GnuPG documentation;

while the reStructuredText files are intended for use with Docutils and

Sphinx, as with other Python projects.

.. _sphinx-made-epubs-suck:

Cautionary Notes regarding Sphinx and EPUB

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Though Python\'s Docutils in conjunction with Sphinx is capable of

generating some very useful HTML sites, as proven by `Read the

Docs <https://readthedocs.org/>`__ and the `Python

documentation <https://docs.python.org/>`__, there are a number of

output formats it does not handle well. At the top of the list of things

it manages to break so atrociously as to be embarassing is the `EPUB

3 <http://idpf.org/epub>`__ format.

The automatically generated EPUB of the CPython documentation always

contains hundreds of validation errors and even the modest amount of

documentation here `produced a

file <https://files.au.adversary.org.s3.amazonaws.com/crypto/gpgme-python/rst/epub/GPGMEPythonBindings.epub>`__

with approximately thirty validation errors. As the volume of

documentation content increases, so does the induced errors. Whereas

Texinfo doesn\'t produce EPUB output at all, nor does Org-mode.

Should there ever be genuine demand for this format, lodge a `feature

request <https://dev.gnupg.org/maniphest/task/edit/form/4/>`__ case

marked for `my <https://dev.gnupg.org/p/BenM/>`__ attention. The means

of generating such files flawlessly is already available, but is not yet

part of the GnuPG build system. Nor is it integrated with a means of

converting Org mode input files to the relevant base format

automatically, as can already be done when converting Org to

reStructuredText or Org to Texinfo. As a certain amount of work would be

required to get it done, there would need to be clear demand for that

work to be done.