What Was New in the GPGME Python Bindings and Documentation
***********************************************************

What Was New
************

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

The following are all the past What's New sections for the Python Bindings HOWTO and other documentation.

What Was New in GPGME 1·12·0
============================

The most obviously new point for those reading this guide is this section on other new things, but that’s hardly important. Not given all the other things which spurred the need for adding this section and its subsections.

New in GPGME 1·12·0
-------------------

There have been quite a number of additions to GPGME and the Python bindings to it since the last release of GPGME with versions 1.11.0 and 1.11.1 in April, 2018.

The bullet points of new additiions are:

  * an expanded section on installing (gpgme-python-howto#installation) and troubleshooting (gpgme-python-howto#snafu) the Python bindings.

  * The release of Python 3.7.0; which appears to be working just fine with our bindings, in spite of intermittent reports of problems for many other Python projects with that new release.

  * Python 3.7 has been moved to the head of the specified python versions list in the build process.

  * In order to fix some other issues, there are certain underlying functions which are more exposed through the gpg.Context() (gpgme-python-howto#howto-get-context), but ongoing documentation ought to clarify that or otherwise provide the best means of using the bindings.  Some additions to gpg.core and the Context(), however, were intended (see below).

  * Continuing work in identifying and confirming the cause of oft-reported problems installing the Python bindings on Windows (gpgme-python-howto#snafu-runtime-not-funtime).

  * GSOC: Google's Surreptitiously Ordered Conscription ... erm ... oh, right; Google's Summer of Code.  Though there were two hopeful candidates this year; only one ended up involved with the GnuPG Project directly, the other concentrated on an unrelated third party project with closer ties to one of the GNU/Linux distributions than to the GnuPG Project.  Thus the Python bindings benefited from GSOC participant Jacob Adams, who added the key_import function; building on prior work by Tobias Mueller.

  * Several new methods functions were added to the gpg.Context(), including: key_import (gpgme-python-howto#howto-import-key), key_export (gpgme-python-howto#howto-export-key), key_export_minimal (gpgme-python-howto#howto-export-public-key) and key_export_secret (gpgme-python-howto#howto-export-secret-key).

  * Importing and exporting examples include versions integrated with Marcel Fest's recently released HKP for Python (https://github.com/Selfnet/hkp4py) module.  Some additional notes on this module (gpgme-python-howto#hkp4py) are included at the end of the HOWTO.

  * Instructions for dealing with semi-walled garden implementations like ProtonMail are also included.  This is intended to make things a little easier when communicating with users of ProtonMail's services and should not be construed as an endorsement of said service.  The GnuPG Project neither favours, nor disfavours ProtonMail and the majority of this deals with interacting with the ProtonMail keyserver.

  * Semi-formalised the location where draft versions (gpgme-python-howto#draft-editions) of this HOWTO may periodically be accessible.  This is both for the reference of others and testing the publishing of the document itself.  Renamed this file at around the same time.

  * The Texinfo documentation build configuration has been replicated from the parent project in order to make to maintain consistency with that project (and actually ship with each release).

  * a reStructuredText (.rst) version is also generated for Python developers more used to and comfortable with that format as it is the standard Python documentation format and Python developers may wish to use it with Sphinx.  Please note that there has been no testing of the reStructuredText version with Sphinx at all.  The reST file was generated by the simple expedient of using Pandoc (https://pandoc.org/).

  * Added a new section for advanced or experimental use (gpgme-python-howto#advanced-use).

  * Began the advanced use cases with a section (gpgme-python-howto#cython) on using the module with Cython (https://cython.org/).

  * Added a number of new scripts to the example/howto/ directory; some of which may be in advance of their planned sections of the HOWTO (and some are just there because it seemed like a good idea at the time).

  * Cleaned up a lot of things under the hood.