GPA Portable Development Test 6 (testers please?)

It insists on looking in the registry to find out where gpg.exe is ... even if there is a copy in its directory with it as per the standard distribution. Sigh.

This will need a bit of tweaking to use the CommonFiles location exclusively or seamlessly. Shouldn't be too hard.

All true, unfortunately.

On the other hand, WinPT is currently housed at the same gpg4win site as GPA, is distributed in the gpg4win package along with GPA and other things, and it does work fairly well.

Unless there is a security issue or incompatibility of some sort, I'm more concerned about whether a program works than whether it is actively maintained.

While there hasn't been a GPA update in almost a year, and it is still in beta, I'm happy to note that there have been changes checked in to SVN this month. I hope he is making it less dependent on the registry instead of more. I also hope he is working on clipboard operation, e.g. "decrypt/validate clipboard" will offer to add a key found there to the key ring.

Begin rant...

All of the GPG4WIN applications are based on GPGME. They are being developed by some German developers who believe that the only way a Windows application can get information or store configuration is to use the Windows registry, and they have set up GPGME's win32 library with that in mind. They have so far (after at least two years of requests in their forums) shown no inclination to consider that there might be another way (e.g. environment variables, configuration files, whatever).

It looks to me like the only way to resolve the situation is for those of us who want to be liberated from the Windows Registry split off a branch that isn't tied so closely to the Windows Registry. One question is whether the current GPA or GPGEE or whatever will take up the slack of WinPT, or whether WinPT is a product that should be brought back from its current deep sleep. At any rate, as long as they depend on GPGME, they will have a requirement that GPG be installed in a certain way and with the appropriate registry entries.

(I suppose we could also just use Linux, which probably won't have those problems in that way, even though the GUIs are being developed in a cross platform way by the same people.)

There are a bunch of things I would like to see a Windows GUI for GnuPG do or be. I don't think the current developers are going to move in that direction. If the influence of German supporters on the CA Cert project is any indication, I suspect there will be a big push to move to X.509 certificates with a verification of identity, so as to become integrated into the German digital signature legal structure. (CA Cert requires that its members accept a binding 1000 Euro liability under arbitration if a relying party feels s/he has been harmed by the relying party's reliance on a certificate. Not whether the certificate user made a fraudulent assertion with the certificate, not whether the EULA or other contract entered into e.g. with a signature, was complied with, but whether the relying party thinks s/he was harmed.) I could be wrong, and only CA Cert is moving in that direction, while GnuPG will continue with a "web of trust". But they certainly do seem to be moving ahead with X.509 certificates, and they seem to be integrating their GPG applications tightly into the Windows operating system (non-portably).

I suppose the other thing we could hope for is a way that USB-based applications can integrate themselves into the registry (including shell extensions and all the rest) as the USB is mounted, with a clean and safe cleanup even if the drive is not dismounted cleanly (e.g. after a power failure). Once that appears (in a way that doesn't require Admin privileges) the question about GPGME's use of the registry on Win32 will become moot, and we can look forward to using all of those applications -- GPGEE, GPA, and even WinPT for the rest of its useful life.

End of rant.

Are you saying that neither GPA nor WinPT (Portable) will work on your setup? Can you give us a little more information, like what error messages you see, etc? This is a beta test of the portable environment, after all, and people who find it doesn't work are supposed to give information that might help the developers to get it working.

Let's take this discussion to the WinPT Portable topic. GPA uses the same underlying GnuPG, but has a different structure and doesn't handle the clipboard. GPG4WIN.ORG seems to have taken over all of the projects ... and none seems to be particularly active. But this topic is for GPA, so just to keep things clean, let's talk about WinPT in its own area.

MStinaff has mentioned redoing WinPT somehow, perhaps to make it easier to Portablize, but possibly also to bring it up to date.