PGP::Sign 1.02

This is another test-only release of my module for manipulating PGP signatures in Perl. I'm trying to get the CPAN testing failures down to a dull roar. This iteration fixes some testing issues with systems that have only GnuPG v1 and tries to handle systems whose gpg is GnuPG v2 but is older than 2.1.12 and therefore doesn't have the --pinentry-mode flag that GnuPG uses to suppress password prompting.

I handled the latter by skipping the tests if the gpg on the user's PATH was too old. I'm not certain this is the best approach, although it makes the CPAN automated testing more useful for me, since the module will not work without special configuration on those systems. On the other hand, if someone is installing it to point to some other GnuPG binary on the system at runtime, failing the installation because their system gpg is too old seems wrong, and the test failure doesn't indicate a bug in the module.

Essentially, I'm missing richer test metadata in the Perl ecosystem. I want to be able to declare a dependency on a non-Perl system binary, but of course Perl has no mechanism to do that.

I thought about trying to deal with the Windows failures due to missing IPC::Run features (redirecting high-numbered file descriptors) on the Windows platform in a similar way, but decided in that case I do want the tests to fail because PGP::Sign will never work on that platform regardless of the runtime configuration. Here too I spent some time searching for some way to indicate with Module::Build that the module doesn't work on Windows, and came up empty. This seems to be a gap in Perl's module distribution ecosystem.

In any case, hopefully this release will clean up the remaining test failures on Linux and BSD systems, and I can move on to work on the Big Eight signing key, which was the motivating application for these releases.

You can get the latest release from CPAN or from the PGP::Sign distribution page.

Posted: 2020-08-29 14:47 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2020-08-29