Hacker News Reader

Comment by gcv | Hacker News Reader

The last version of GPGTools I looked at had the irritating habit of always installing its own copy of GPG into /usr/local and not letting me use my own version (e.g., from Homebrew). Is this still the case in version 2?

It would be far cleaner if it was more self-contained (e.g., included GPG inside its installation bundle), and then let the user pick an alternative OpenPGP installation in the preferences.

View on HN

Thanks guys — I was afraid it was something like that. I absolutely hate it when Mac software litters stuff outside of its bundle without even asking the user. Plenty of people figured it out correctly — GitHub.app, for example, installs a copy of the git command-line tools into its ./Content/Resources/git, and remains self-contained and clean.

GPGTools guys — if you're reading this thread, please please stop installing stuff outside your plugin's bundles.

It seems to still do that, however I have not had any problems installing gpg2 via homebrew and overwriting the destination binary, e.g.,

    brew link gpg2 --overwrite

(use the above with `--dry-run` first; I only have one symlink that gets overwritten, but you may have more.)

It's "self-contained" in /usr/local/MacGPG2. Only creates symlinks into /usr/local/bin but will avoid that if it recognizes another gpg already being linked there. Also, linking warnings when using homebrew's GPG are resolved.

I see. This isn't clean enough for my tastes. I run Homebrew from a custom directory, not /usr/local, and I want to make GPGMail refer to the gpg binary there. No Mac app installer should ever write anything to /usr/local.

PS: If you are a maintainer, thank you for all the hard work. I'm only criticizing the current installation system because I really want to use GPGMail, and it does not fit into the way I like to set up my machine.

There is a "Customize" option in the installer that seems to provide an option to not install MacGPG, but I haven't tried that to make sure.

Yes, you can choose to install GPGMail, GPGPreferences, etc., without MacGPG, and use your own gpg binaries such as from homebrew.

I tried installing GPGMail stand-alone with a previous version, and it caused Mail.app to crash on start, presumably because /usr/local/bin/gpg was not available.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com