pygpgme 0.1 released

March 29, 2006

Back in January I started working on a new Python wrapper for the GPGME library. I recently put out the first release:

http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/pygpgme/0.1

This library allows you to encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify messages in the OpenPGP format, using gpg as the backend. In general, it stays fairly close to the C API with the following changes:

Represent C structures as Python classes where appropriate (e.g. contexts, keys, etc). Operations on those data types are converted to methods.
The gpgme_data_t type is not exposed directly. Instead, any Python object that looks like a file object can be passed (including StringIO objects).
In cases where there are gpgme_op_XXXX() and gpgme_op_XXXX_result() function pairs, these have been replaced by a single gpgme.Context.XXXX() method. Errors are returned in the exception where appropriate.
No explicit memory management. As expected for a Python module, memory management is automatic.

The module also releases the global interpreter lock over calls that fork gpg subprocesses. This should make the module multithread friendly.

This code is being used inside Launchpad to verify incoming email and help manage users' PGP public keys.

In other news, gnome-gpg 0.4 made it into dapper, so users of the next Ubuntu release can see the improvements.