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.

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.

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).

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.

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.