gnupg/doc/sysnotes.texi

@c Copyright (C) 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
@c This is part of the GnuPG manual.
@c For copying conditions, see the file gnupg.texi.

@node System Notes
@chapter Notes pertaining to certain OSes.

GnuPG has been developed on GNU/Linux systems and is know to work on
almost all Free OSes.  All modern POSIX systems should be supproted
right now, however there are probably a lot of smaller glitches we need
to fix first.  The major problem areas are:

@itemize
@item 
For logging to sockets and other internal operations the
@code{fopencookie} function (@code{funopen} under *BSD) is used.  This
is a very convient function which makes it possible to create outputs in
a structures and easy maintainable way.  The drawback however is that
most proprietary OSes don't support this function.  At g10@tie{}Code we
have looked into several ways on how to overcome this limitation but no
sufficiently easy and maintainable way has been found.  Porting
@emph{glibc} to a general POSIX system is of course an option and would
make writing portable software much easier; this it has not yet been
done and the system administrator wouldneed to cope with the GNU
specific admin things in addition to the generic ones of his system.

We have now settled to use explicit stdio wrappers with a functionality
similar to funopen.  Although the code for this has already been written
(@emph{libestream}), we have not yet changed GnuPG to use it.

This means that on systems not supporting either @code{funopen} or
@code{fopencookie}, logging to a socket won't work, prompts are not
formatted as pretty as theyshould be and @command{gpgsm}'s
@code{LISTKEYS} Assuan command does not work.

@item
We are planning to use file descriptor passing for interprocess
communication.  This will allow us save a lot of resources and improve
performance of certain operations a lot.  Systems not supporting this
won't gain these benefits but we try to keep them working the satndard
way as it is done today.

@item
We require more or less full POSIX compatibility.  This has been
arround for 15 years now and thus we don't believe it makes sense to
support non POSIX systems anymore.  Well, we of course the usual
workarounds for near POSIX systems well be applied.

There is one exception of this rule: Systems based the Microsoft Windows
API (called here @emph{W32}) will be supported to some extend.

@end itemize


@menu
* W32 Notes::             Microsoft Windows Notes
@end menu


@node W32 Notes
@section Microsoft Windows Notes

The port to Microsoft Windows based OSes is pretty new and has some
limitations we might remove over time.  Note, that we have not yet done
any security audit and you should not use any valuable private key.  In
particular, @strong{using it on a box with more than one user, might
lead to a key compromise}.

@strong{It is quite possible that the current version does not even
build.}

@noindent
Current limitations are:

@itemize
@item
The @code{LISTKEYS} Assuan command of @command{gpgsm} is not supported.
Using the command line options @option{--list-keys} or
@option{--list-secret-keys} does however work.

@item 
No support for CRL checks.  By default the option
@option{--disable-crl-checks} has been turned on and the log will show
an appropriate warning message.  The reason for this is that the
separate CRL checking daemin (@command{dirmngr}) has not been ported to
W32.

@item
@command{gpgconf} does not create backup files, so in case of trouble
your configuration file might get lost.

@item
@command{watchgnupg} is not available.  Logging to sockets is not
possible.

@item
The periodical smartcard status checking done by @command{scdaemon} is
not yet supported.

@item
Detached running of the gpg-agent is not directly supported.  It needs
to be started in a console and left alone then.

@end itemize