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Comment by sounds | Hacker News Reader

The author implies that GnuPG should work the way he wants it to work. Now to be fair, it would be nice to have great GnuPG integration everywhere, including on iDevices.

But some perspective is needed here. GnuPG works fine in a POSIX environment. All popular platforms can handle that. This isn't the first command-line tool that needed to be integrated into a GUI. Seriously – that's all his complaint amounts to.

There may be a need for a library wrapper around GnuPG, but this complaint is not the need.

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Something about your post really, really bothers me. I don't know what it is exactly.

GnuPG is an open source implementation of the OpenPGP standard. PGP is not in widespread use. GnuPG is not a good tool to add PGP support to other software.

That's a perfectly valid complaint. Your casual dismissal seems very wrong to me.

"PGP is not in widespread use."

Depends on what industry/domain you work in. The reason PGP isn't more widely used is: It's expensive, it's complex to the typical "user" and businesses don't want to invest in real PKI even if they need it. (People are lazy and cheap...)

Add in the factor that most developers don't have the chops to figure out and implement nicer software based on the mess that is GPG. You have a few serious tools wrapping it used in ETL applications and ilk like Gpg4Win and the Bouncy Castle libraries.

I think iOS doesn't allow normal programs to fork().

GPL and LGPL are not iOS compatible so it's already a non-option

Some links to read more about this,

ffmpeg (LGPL): https://ffmpeg.org/trac/ffmpeg/ticket/1229

vlc (LGPL): http://waffle.wootest.net/2011/01/08/vlc-gpl-tuaw-wtf/

This is a frequently repeated oversimplification. (L)GPL is not incompatible with iOS, it is incompatible with the Apple App Store.

It is fully, 100% GPL-compliant to release a (L)GPL'd iOS application linked to a (L)GPL'd library, as source code, with instructions on how to build and load on your iOS device.

It is /probably/ not compliant to distribute that through the App Store, though there is some disagreement, and it has never been taken to court.

It is /definitely/ not compliant to distribute a proprietary app that links to an (L)GPL'd library through the App Store, since Apple only permits static linking.

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