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authorWerner Koch <wk@gnupg.org>2007-12-20 09:52:40 +0100
committerWerner Koch <wk@gnupg.org>2007-12-20 09:52:40 +0100
commit157d4479aa1406418344fd80fb4534dc403f0503 (patch)
tree36f4ae3fc52157025d40de1769712440c08775f8
parentFixed a W32 ldaps problem. (diff)
downloadgnupg2-157d4479aa1406418344fd80fb4534dc403f0503.tar.xz
gnupg2-157d4479aa1406418344fd80fb4534dc403f0503.zip
Preparing a release.gnupg-2.0.8
-rw-r--r--ChangeLog7
-rw-r--r--NEWS27
-rw-r--r--README.maint4
-rw-r--r--configure.ac2
-rw-r--r--doc/a-decade-of-gnupg.txt198
5 files changed, 223 insertions, 15 deletions
diff --git a/ChangeLog b/ChangeLog
index 21d84e9f8..59de910d1 100644
--- a/ChangeLog
+++ b/ChangeLog
@@ -1,3 +1,7 @@
+2007-12-20 Werner Koch <wk@g10code.com>
+
+ Released 2.0.8.
+
2007-12-17 Werner Koch <wk@g10code.com>
* configure.ac: Add treatment for HAVE_LDAP_START_TLS_SA.
@@ -1018,7 +1022,8 @@
* configure.ac (HAVE_JNLIB_LOGGING): always define it.
- Copyright 2001, 2002, 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+ Copyright 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006,
+ 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This file is free software; as a special exception the author gives
unlimited permission to copy and/or distribute it, with or without
diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index 28a31a93f..415c81ecb 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -1,21 +1,17 @@
-Noteworthy changes in version 2.0.8
+Noteworthy changes in version 2.0.8 (2007-12-20)
------------------------------------------------
- * Make sure that under Windows the file permissions of the socket are
- taken into account. This required a change of our socket emulation
- code; thus old GnuPG modules can't be used anymore.
-
- * Fixed a crash in gpgconf.
-
* Enhanced gpg-connect-agent with a small scripting language.
* New option --list-config for gpgconf.
- * The envvars XAUTHORITY and PINENTRY_USER_DATA are now passed to the
- pinentry.
+ * Fixed a crash in gpgconf.
- * Allow encryption with legacy Elgamal sign+encrypt keys with option
- --rfc2440.
+ * Gpg-agent now supports the passphrase quality bar of the latest
+ Pinentry.
+
+ * The envvars XAUTHORITY and PINENTRY_USER_DATA are now passed to the
+ Pinentry.
* Fixed the auto creation of the key stub for smartcards.
@@ -26,6 +22,15 @@ Noteworthy changes in version 2.0.8
* New option --extra-digest-algo for gpgsm to allow verification of
broken signatures.
+ * Allow encryption with legacy Elgamal sign+encrypt keys with option
+ --rfc2440.
+
+ * Windows is now a supported platform.
+
+ * Made sure that under Windows the file permissions of the socket are
+ taken into account. This required a change of our socket emulation
+ code and changed the IPC protocol under Windows.
+
Noteworthy changes in version 2.0.7 (2007-09-10)
------------------------------------------------
diff --git a/README.maint b/README.maint
index 3621fda11..1cbfdd5da 100644
--- a/README.maint
+++ b/README.maint
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ Release Planning:
=================
If you are planning a new release and strings have changed you should
-send a notification to all tyranslators, so that they have time to
+send a notification to all translators, so that they have time to
update their translations. scripts/mail-to-translators is useful for
this. It might need some tweaking and it needs to be armored for
actual sending. Running it as is to see what will happen is a good
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ Release process:
* Run "make distcheck".
* Build and test the new tarball (best on a different machine).
* Build and test the W32 version.
- * Using the final test build run a "make -C doc online".
+ * [2.x only] Using the final test build run a "make -C doc online".
* Sign the tarball
* Get the previous tarball and run "mkdiff gnupg".
You might need to set a different signature key than mine. mkdiff
diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac
index 2212e7511..1823ac678 100644
--- a/configure.ac
+++ b/configure.ac
@@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ min_automake_version="1.10"
# Set my_issvn to "yes" for non-released code. Remember to run an
# "svn up" and "autogen.sh" right before creating a distribution.
m4_define([my_version], [2.0.8])
-m4_define([my_issvn], [yes])
+m4_define([my_issvn], [no])
m4_define([svn_revision], m4_esyscmd([echo -n $( (svn info 2>/dev/null \
diff --git a/doc/a-decade-of-gnupg.txt b/doc/a-decade-of-gnupg.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..a42d741d8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/doc/a-decade-of-gnupg.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,198 @@
+ A Short History of the GNU Privacy Guard
+ ========================================
+
+It's been a decade now that the very first version of the GNU Privacy
+Guard [0] has been released. This very first version was not yet
+known under the name of GnuPG but dubbed "g10" as a reference on the
+German constitution article on freedom of telecommunication
+(Grundgesetz Artikel 10) and as a pun on the G-10 law which allows the
+secret services to bypass these constitutional guaranteed freedoms.
+
+Version 0.0.0 released on December 20th 1997 [1], was a barely working
+replacement of PGP avoiding all patented algorithm by using Elgamal
+and Blowfish instead of RSA and IDEA. It was prominently marked as a
+test version but nevertheless included most of the features of the
+current GnuPG. The data format however was not compatible with
+OpenPGP but oriented towards the PGP 2 format with a few extensions
+(e.g. to allow streaming of data). The OpenPGP working group was
+founded back in fall 1997 and I learned a bit to late about it to
+build "g10" according to the then existing draft. For copyright
+reasons it was practically not possible to reverse engineer the format
+used by PGP-5, so the establishment of the OpenPGP WG was the right
+thing at the right time.
+
+Before talking about GnuPG we need to go some more years back in
+history: To help political activists Phil Zimmermann published a
+software called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) in 1991. PGP was designed
+as an easy to use encryption tool with no backdoors and disclosed
+source code. PGP was indeed intended to be cryptographically strong
+and not just pretty good; however it had a couple of inital bugs, most
+of all a home designed cipher algorithm. With the availability of the
+source code a community of hackers (Branko Lankester, Colin Plumb,
+Derek Atkins, Hal Finney, Peter Gutmann and others) helped him to fix
+these flaws and a get a solid version 2 out.
+
+Soon after that the trouble started. As in many counties the use or
+export of cryptographic devices and software was also strongly
+restricted in the USA. Only weak cryptography was generally allowed.
+PGP was much stronger and due to the Usenet and the availability of
+FTP servers and BBSs, PGP accidently leaked out of the country and
+soon Phil was sued for unlicensed munitions export. Those export
+control laws were not quite up to the age of software with the funny
+effect that exporting the software in printed form seemed not to be
+restricted. MIT Press thus published a book with the PGP source code
+which was then scanned outside the USA to form the base of PGP-2i ("i"
+for international). Since then that version was used widely.
+
+The criminal investigations against Phil ended in 1996 and he founded
+PGP Inc to write PGP-5. The first public release was done in spring
+1997. The same year at the 39th IETF meeting at Munich in August Phil
+Zimmermann and Jon Callas asked the IETF to setup a working group to
+publish a standard for the protocol used by PGP-5 under the name
+OpenPGP. The main drive behind this was to allow widespread use of
+strong encryption even if at some point the new company would decide
+to stop selling and supporting PGP. As it turned out PGP Inc was
+acquired by Network Associates just a few months later and in 2002
+this company actually ceased support and development of PGP (though
+the PGP product was later continued by the new PGP Corporation).
+
+Also often claimed to be Free Software, PGP has never fulfilled the
+requirements for it: PGP-5 is straight proprietary software; the
+availability of the source code alonedoes not make it free. PGP-2 has
+certain restrictions on commercial use [2] and thus puts restrictions
+on the software which makes it also non-free. Another problem with
+PGP-2 is that it requires the use of the patented RSA and IDEA
+algorithms. The patent on RSA was only valid in the USA but the
+patent on IDEA was and is still valid [3] in most countries.
+
+Although the GNU project listed a requirement for a PGP replacement
+for some years on its task list, it was not possible to start
+implementing it as long as patents on all public key algorithms were
+valid. That changed when in April 1997 the basic patent on public key
+algorithms expired (the Diffie-Hellman US patent 4200770) and finally
+in August when the broader Hellman-Merkle patent (4218582) expired.
+
+A month later, at the Individual-Network Betriebstagung at Aachen [4],
+Richard Stallman continued his talk with a BoF session where he asked
+the European hackers to start implementing public key software. The
+arms trafficker laws of the USA prohibited the GNU project to write
+such software in their country or even by US citizens working abroad.
+Thus he told the European hackers that they are in the unique position
+to help the GNU with crypto software.
+
+Being tired of writing SMGL conversion software and without a current
+fun project, I soon found my self hacking on PGP-2 parsing code based
+on the description in RFC-1991 and the pgformat.txt file. As this
+turned out to be easy I continued and finally came up with code to
+decrypt and create PGP-2 data. After I told the GNU towers that I
+will take up the PGP replacement implementation I spend the rest of
+the year replacing IDEA by Blowfish, RSA by Elgamal, implementing
+streaming encryption, adding some key management and getting the code
+into a reasonable shape.
+
+There used to be a plan for a free version of Secure Shell called PSST
+(later known as LSH) with a somewhat populated mailing lists
+maintained by Martin Hamilton. Martin was the so kind to setup a
+mailing list for g10 too and announced it on that list. This way we
+got the first subscribers. Eventually I made the first tarball, put
+it up to ftp.guug.de, the FTP server of the German Unix User Group,
+and wrote an announcement [5].
+
+Right the next day Peter Gutmann offered to allow the use of his
+random number code for systems without a /dev/random. This eventually
+helped a lot to make GnuPG portable to many platforms. The next two
+months were filled with code updates and a lengthly discussion on the
+name; we finally settled for Anand Kumria's suggestion of GnuPG and
+made the first release under this name (gnupg-0.2.8) on Feb 24 [6].
+Just a few days later an experimental version with support for Windows
+was released. (That release also fixed an alignment problem on Alpha
+boxes which was detected due to kernel log files filling up the hard
+disk and an admin asking whether they really need to be backed up. ;-)
+
+In July 1998 the first more or less OpenPGP draft compliant version
+was released. Matthew Skala had contributed Twofish code done cleanly
+from scratch (Twofish was at that time a promising AES candidate and
+suggested by Schneier as a Blowfish replacement; however we had some
+copyright concerns with the reference code). Michael Roth contributed
+a Triple-DES implementation later the year and thus completed the
+required set of OpenPGP algorithms. Over the next year the usual
+problems were solved, features discussed, complaints noticed and
+support for gpg in various other software was introduced by their
+respective authors.
+
+Finally, on September 7, 1999 the current code was released as version
+1.0.0 with the major update of including Mike Ashley's GNU Privacy
+Handbook [7]. A year later the RSA patent was to expire on September
+20; the patent holder placed the patent into the public domain 3 weeks
+earlier and thus we could release 1.0.3 with RSA support already on
+September 18. One of the major obstacles on widespread use public
+cryptography had gone (far too late of course).
+
+Also in 1999 the German government decided that strong encryption will
+not be regulated in any way and that its use is recommended for
+everyone. To publicly support this statement the Ministry of
+Economics funded the porting of GnuPG and related software to
+Microsoft Windows [8]. The US government was not keen to see that and
+tried to urge the German government to revise the decision to allow
+unregulated distribution of crypto software [9]. That did not work
+out and to the end the USA had no other way than to weaken their own
+export rules.
+
+Although we still develop GnuPG using servers located in Europe the
+new US export controls eventually allowed US hackers to contribute to
+GnuPG development. In 2001 David Shaw joined the project and since
+then he is one of the most active GnuPG hackers and the co-maintainer.
+
+It's now a long time since GnuPG could be managed as a fun project and
+thus I spend most of my professional life maintaining and extending
+GnuPG. In 2001 I founded g10 Code, a Free Software company for the
+development and support of GnuPG and related software. The most known
+project is probably GnuPG-2 which started under the name NewPG as part
+of the broader Aegypten project. The main goal of Aegypten was to
+provide support for S/MIME under GNU/Linux and integrate that cleanly
+with other mail clients, most notably KMail. Although having been
+actively used since 2004, we released 2.0.0 only one years ago.
+
+It was not that much fun writing X.509/CMS (commonly named S/MIME)
+software compared to the elegant and very interoperable OpenPGP
+protocol. Having mastered that we meanwhile achieved to provide a
+software which is really useful and works nicely with almost any other
+S/MIME implementation. It also turned out that we could port GnuPG-2
+to Windows - despite my original claim that a modern POSIX platform
+will be needed for GnuPG-2. This development also showed that it is
+viable to develop Free Software as a business.
+
+With the new tools and from a user's perspective S/MIME and OpenPGP
+will soon not make much of a difference anymore. However I had to
+smile when I today read a report on the last RSA Europe conference
+where a quick poll during a talk showed that OpenPGP is the mostly
+used encryption protocol.
+
+Recall that GnuPG is just one tool; there are numerous other tools out
+to solve related privacy problems. Kudos to all who worked on writing
+and deploying privacy tools over all these years!
+
+
+Happy Hacking,
+
+ Werner
+
+
+[0] http://www/gnupg.org
+[1] ftp://ftp.gnupg.org/gcrypt/historic/g10-0.0.0.tar.gz
+[2] from pgpdoc2.txt: "Finally, if you want to turn PGP into a
+ commercial product and make money selling it, then we must agree
+ on a way for me to also make money on it. [...] Under no
+ circumstances may PGP be distributed without the PGP
+ documentation, including this PGP User's Guide."
+[3] "valid" is meant in the sense the patent holders use it and does
+ not imply that I regard patents on software a valid concept. See
+ http://www.fsfeurope.org/projects/swpat/background.en.html .
+[4] http://www.dascon.de/IN-BT97/programm.html
+[5] http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-devel/1997-December/014131.html
+ There are just a few mails in December mainly discussing patent things.
+[6] http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-devel/1998-February/014208.html
+[7] http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-announce/1999q3/000037.html
+[8] http://partners.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/11/cyber/articles/19encrypt.html
+[9] http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/5/5124/1.html
+