Windows support?

[ohbadiah]

Since both rust and gpg run on Windows, what obstacles are there to sy running on Windows, too?

Hi @ohbadiah , thanks for asking publicly.

There is indeed no technical reason, just me hesitating from setting up circleCI for windows workers, and jumping to all the hoops to make it work with the GPGME bindings. They add a lot of complexity, unfortunately.

Maybe it's not as hard as I think, after all I didn't try it.
As I don't need it for windows myself, I don't see me making the attempt either.

Does that answer your question? Would you like to see this go forward?

Thanks and cheers,
Sebastian

[ohbadiah]

Thanks for the quick response. I'm almost interested enough to offer to give it a shot myself, but I think I'd better not bite that off.

I'm a little new to Rust, and realizing that Windows compatibility is limited by C/C++ compatibility on Windows. Since that doesn't "just work," it seems like neither does Rust.

@moritzheiber By popular demand, I will be working on this eventually. Let's see when I actually find time, but it's on my agenda now and it's what I will be doing next.

First goal: get it to compile in a VM and upload the binaries to get people started. Second on the list is to automate that with circle-ci and get it to upload binaries to github-pages automatically.

[moritzheiber]

@Byron-TW This is where I love Rust for having cargo. I'll probably bite my own ass for this but .. this should be fairly simple. Let me know if you need any testers, our team would be happy to oblige.

Thanks!

[Byron]

Just FYI: I am postponing this task until I have my new computer. It should make working on this so much more comfortable due to reduced cycle times.

[moritzheiber]

@Byron do you have an estimate as to when that’s going to be? I might be able to .. „expedite“ the delivery ;)

I just know it’s on 'the list' of machines to be ordered and D. is on it personally :). Of course I could try to get things done on my current machine, but ... it really is no fun anymore :(. ‘Expedite’ if you must ;).

Here is my progress so far...
First I installed a parallels VM with all tools required... that took a while :D

Now I try to build the CLI (and later 'libgpg-error'), which displays this issue:

A tiny bit of digging reveals this surprising comment of the maintainer of gpgme-rs who states that windows is not currently supported.

I will reach out to him now to see if I can help.
An alternative approach would be to migrate to sequoia, which is early in development and which doesn't seem to have any signs of windows support just yet.

[moritzheiber]

I think the only hope for using GPG on Windows right now is gpg4win. Without it none of the regular tooling would/should work. Gopass at least starts supporting encryption with it, so I'd say that could be your next move, alongside git-bash or WSL.

[moritzheiber]

btw, https://gitlab.com/sequoia-pgp/sequoia now says its low-level API is feature complete .. maybe it's worth taking another look at?

Thanks! I took a look at the sequoia examples and believe that the reading of public keys would already work. Looking deeper into it, it seems that crypto is supported, too.

Even though I would still have to verify it's actually doing the same thing and, generally, works. The sample programs should allow that: https://gitlab.com/sequoia-pgp/sequoia/tree/master/openpgp/examples .

Maybe Windows just moved into the realm of the possible.