Short History

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+#+TITLE: A Short History of gpg bindings for Python
+
+In 2002 John Goerzen released PyME; Python bindings for the GPGME module
+which utilised the current release of Python of the time (Python 2.2 or
+2.3) and SWIG. Shortly after creating it and ensuring it worked he
+stopped supporting it, though left his work available on his Gopher
+site.
+
+A couple of years later the project was picked up by Igor Belyi and
+actively developed and maintained by him from 2004 to 2008. Igor's
+whereabouts at the time of this document's creation are unknown, but the
+current authors do hope he is well. We're assuming (or hoping) that life
+did what life does and made continuing untenable.
+
+In 2014 Martin Albrecht wanted to patch a bug in the PyME code and
+discovered the absence of Igor. Following a discussion on the PyME
+mailing list he became the new maintainer for PyME, releasing version
+0.9.0 in May of that year. He remains the maintainer of the original
+PyME release in Python 2.6 and 2.7 (available via PyPI).
+
+In 2015 Ben McGinnes approached Martin about a Python 3 version, while
+investigating how complex a task this would be the task ended up being
+completed. A subsequent discussion with Werner Koch led to the decision
+to fold the Python 3 port back into the original GPGME release in the
+languages subdirectory for non-C bindings. Ben is the maintainer of the
+Python 3 port within GPGME.
+
+In 2016 PyME was renamed to "gpg" and adopted by the upstream GnuPG
+team.
+
+* The Annoyances of Git
+  :PROPERTIES:
+  :CUSTOM_ID: the-annoyances-of-git
+  :END:
+
+As anyone who has ever worked with git knows, submodules are horrible
+way to deal with pretty much anything. In the interests of avoiding
+migraines, that is being skipped with addition of PyME to GPGME. Instead
+the files will be added to the subdirectory, along with a copy of the
+entire git log up to that point as a separate file within the docs
+directory (old-commits.log). As the log for PyME is nearly 100KB and the
+log for GPGME is approximately 1MB, this would cause considerable bloat,
+as well as some confusion, should the two be merged. Hence the
+unfortunate, but necessary, step to simply move the files. A regular
+repository version will be maintained should it be possible to implement
+this better in the future.
+
+* The Perils of PyPI
+  :PROPERTIES:
+  :CUSTOM_ID: the-perils-of-pypi
+  :END:
+
+At the current time the Python 3 fork is not available via PyPI and the
+pip installer. The recommended installation method is to follow the
+instructions in lang/py3-pyme/INSTALL. This will build the necessary
+SWIG portions against the installed version of GPGME.