PGP::Sign 1.04

(create and verify detached PGP signatures)
Maintained by Russ Allbery <rra@cpan.org>

Copyright 1997-2000, 2002, 2004, 2018, 2020, 2022 Russ Allbery <rra@cpan.org>. This software is distributed under the same terms as Perl itself. Please see the section LICENSE below for more information.

BLURB

PGP::Sign is a Perl module for generating and verifying detached OpenPGP signatures of textual data using GnuPG. It was written to support Netnews article signatures for signed control messages and PGPMoose.

DESCRIPTION

PGP::Sign is a Perl module that can generate and verify OpenPGP signatures on some data. Currently, only textual data (data that can be processed using GnuPG's --textmode option) is supported. It uses GnuPG under the hood to do the work.

The original purpose of this module was to factor out common code in a News::Article class written by Andrew Gierth that handled PGPMoose and control message signatures. It is used to verify control message signatures for the ftp.isc.org Netnews metadata archive, and to generate signed control messages for the Big Eight Usenet hierarchies.

Data to be signed or verified can be passed into PGP::Sign in a wide variety of formats: scalars, arrays, open files, even code references that act as generators. Keys with passphrases are supported and the passphrase is passed to GnuPG securely (although getting the passphrase to the PGP::Sign module is a problem for the calling application).

This module supports both GnuPG v2 and GnuPG v1 and, when used with GnuPG v1, supports using OpenPGP keys and generating and verifying signatures that are backward-compatible with PGP 2.6.2.

PGP::Sign provides both a (recommended) object-oriented API and a (legacy) function-based API that uses global variables for configuration and is backward-compatible with earlier versions of PGP::Sign.

REQUIREMENTS

Perl 5.20 or later and Module::Build are required to build this module, and IPC::Run is required to use it. Either GnuPG v2 (version 2.1.23 or later) or GnuPG v1 (version 1.4.20 or later) is also required. The implementation of GnuPG can be selected at runtime.

PGP::Sign requires the ability to redirect higher-numbered file descriptors via IPC::Run, and thus will not work on Windows unless Perl is built with some UNIX emulation layer that supports this. It has also never been tested with Gpg4win.

BUILDING AND INSTALLATION

PGP::Sign uses Module::Build and can be installed using the same process as any other Module::Build module:
    perl Build.PL
    ./Build
    ./Build install
You will have to run the last command as root unless you're installing into a local Perl module tree in your home directory.

TESTING

PGP::Sign comes with a test suite, which you can run after building with:
    ./Build test
If a test fails, you can run a single test with verbose output via:
    ./Build test --test_files <path-to-test>
If the gpg binary found first on the PATH is too old, the tests will be skipped rather than fail. This may not always be desirable, since the module is not usable on such a system without configuration, but the module can still be configured to use a GnuPG binary found elsewhere and therefore this doesn't represent an error in the module itself.

The following additional Perl modules will be used by the test suite if present:

Devel::Cover

Perl::Critic::Community

Test::CPAN::Changes (part of CPAN-Changes)

Test::MinimumVersion

Test::Perl::Critic

Test::Pod

Test::Pod::Coverage

Test::Spelling

Test::Strict

Test::Synopsis

All are available on CPAN. Those tests will be skipped if the modules are not available.

To enable tests that don't detect functionality problems but are used to sanity-check the release, set the environment variable RELEASE_TESTING to a true value. To enable tests that may be sensitive to the local environment or that produce a lot of false positives without uncovering many problems, set the environment variable AUTHOR_TESTING to a true value.

SUPPORT

The PGP::Sign web page at:
    https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/pgp-sign/
will always have the current version of this package, the current documentation, and pointers to any additional resources.

For bug tracking, use the issue tracker on GitHub:
    https://github.com/rra/pgp-sign/issues
However, please be aware that I tend to be extremely busy and work projects often take priority. I'll save your report and get to it as soon as I can, but it may take me a couple of months.

SOURCE REPOSITORY

PGP::Sign is maintained using Git. You can access the current source on GitHub at:
    https://github.com/rra/pgp-sign
or by cloning the repository at:
    https://git.eyrie.org/git/perl/pgp-sign.git
or view the repository via the web at:
    https://git.eyrie.org/?p=perl/pgp-sign.git
The eyrie.org repository is the canonical one, maintained by the author, but using GitHub is probably more convenient for most purposes. Pull requests are gratefully reviewed and normally accepted.

LICENSE

The PGP::Sign package as a whole is covered by the following copyright statement and license:
  Copyright 1997-2000, 2002, 2004, 2018, 2020, 2022
      Russ Allbery <rra@cpan.org>
  This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify
  it under the same terms as Perl itself.  This means that you may
  choose between the two licenses that Perl is released under: the GNU
  GPL and the Artistic License.  Please see your Perl distribution for
  the details and copies of the licenses.
Some files in this distribution are individually released under different licenses, all of which are compatible with the above general package license but which may require preservation of additional notices. All required notices, and detailed information about the licensing of each file, are recorded in the LICENSE file.

Files covered by a license with an assigned SPDX License Identifier include SPDX-License-Identifier tags to enable automated processing of license information. See https://spdx.org/licenses/ for more information.

For any copyright range specified by files in this package as YYYY-ZZZZ, the range specifies every single year in that closed interval.