Sorry to butt in here but in my first post to the list I mentioned that I was attempting to use FreePascal/Lazarus to interface with GPG via the command line but whilst I had managed to get it working with OpenSSL attempting the same methodology on GPG resulted in a 'hang'.
Now I realise I am a novice and whilst Lazarus is supposedly cross-platform the documentation for Lazarus is hard to interpret presumably because I am a novice but Lazarus is Pascal and cross platform and it is Pascal so I would hope more understandable to knuckle scrapers such as myself. http://wiki.freepascal.org/Executing_External_Programs Someone recently asked about using FreePascal under Windows but made mention of using a DLL. As far as I am aware FreePascal should give you a 'direct' command line interface on any platform. I'll be rubbish here but scratching my head about DLLs reminds me of when I was looking into 'keyloggers' which, under Windows, require a hook into the system if you wish to capture data across running applications... Honest I was trying to catch out a 'Microsoft Support Person' who wanted to fix my computer over the phone. Anyway, for what it might be worth.. http://www.soondae.co.uk/testssl Yes I hate myself already for dropping that one on you with no explanation but basically it is a GUI that interfaces with OpenSSL via the command line in order to generate multiple key pairs. As I say similar does not work on GPG but it would seem that if you can get access to the command line interface for GPG in a similar manner then, being naive, it could be a solution Just floating one Keith On Tue, 2016-03-22 at 13:55 +0000, Andrew Gallagher wrote: > > On 22 Mar 2016, at 10:40, Paolo Bolzoni <paolo.bolzoni.br...@gmail.com> > > wrote: > > > > And besides, it's much easier to build a GUI app in front of a C API > > than a command line application. > > This is undeniably true. Unfortunately you first need to learn the API, which > can be a barrier to someone who knows the command line interface and just > wants to hack together a script to do a particular job. > > Cryptography is hard, and decades later we still aren't at the point where > average computer users can take advantage of it without either first becoming > experts or punching holes in the sides of the boat. For that we need to be > encouraging hackers and tinkerers to experiment with novel interfaces; and > this is best done by giving them the software equivalent of Lego rather than > Meccano. > > This is not a gpg-specific issue. OpenSSL suffers the same problem of having > to be both a comprehensive implementation and a user interface, and handles > it pretty much the same way, by using a basic command prompt. > > Where is the gpg equivalent of easy-rsa though? This is a complaint about > software tools in general, but for hackers and tinkerers inconsistency across > UIs is a significant barrier to entry. If I can't take what I've learned from > using the command line for years and apply it (safely) to writing a modest > shell script, I'm going to think long and hard before taking the time to > learn a Python API. At the very least, any feature accessible through an > interactive interface should have an equivalent command line option, so that > all interactive operations can trivially be automated. Thought should also be > given to whether wrapping all functionality in a single binary with thousands > of options is the best interface to present to even expert command line users > (again, OpenSSL is another offender). > > I say this because I found myself in exactly the same boat as the OP. I > wanted to write a small script for my technically-proficient but > non-cryptography-expert users so that they could easily manage gpg private > keys without me worrying that they'd screw it up; and I ended up with a > fragile interface very similar to his that needed to be completely refactored > using gpgme. Just interfacing with gpg was the most difficult part of the > process; the logic that I built on top of it was easy by comparison. This is > the wrong way around. > > A > _______________________________________________ > Gnupg-users mailing list > Gnupg-users@gnupg.org > http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
