Re: GnuPG in Guix

[Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>]

"g33k0b0y ." <g33k0b0y@gmail.com> writes:

> It seems that Guix can install multiple versions of GPG. It names the
> 1.4.18 version as gpg, and the 2.0.26 version as gpg2.
>
> There is a problem, however.
>
> By default Guix installs the highest version, which is 2.0.26.
> However, an potential newbie could try calling it through bash as gpg.
> This won't work, as it hasn't installed gpg version 1.4.18 and
> therefore is expecting only gpg2 as its command. This is not made
> clear to the user.
>
> If I  am an inexperienced user and install gnupg, from my previous
> experience with other distros, (Trisquel, gNewSense) I would expect to
> use gpg to call it. Imagine my surprise when bash says command not
> found! I am never told to use gpg2 as the command, nor would I think
> of it.
>
> How can we improve this?

On Debian and its derivatives (which include both Trisquel and
gNewSense), gnupg-1.4 and gnupg-2.0 have different package names, not
just different version numbers.  I think that perhaps we should do the
same.

Apart from the issue that raised above, another issue is that one cannot
currently use "guix package -u" if one prefers to use gnupg 1.4.x,
because it will always try to update to 2.0.x, and soon it will try to
upgrade all of us to 2.1.x, which not everyone will want (at least not
right away) because it brings new incompatible changes.

In the case of gnupg, 1.4.x and 2.0.x are really two different programs,
despite their similarity and common heritage.

       Mark