On Fedora 20, with gnupg-1.4.16-2.fc20.x86_64, running "man gpg" yields text
that is not fully informative for new users:

"gpg is the OpenPGP part of the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG). It is a tool to
provide digital encryption and signing services using the OpenPGP standard. gpg
features complete key management and all bells and whistles you can expect from
a decent OpenPGP implementation.

This is the standalone version of gpg. For desktop use you should consider using
gpg2 ([On some platforms gpg2 is installed under the name gpg])."

The question that comes to mind at this point is: what is the difference between
"gpg" and "gpg2"? What is my "gpg" command actually giving me? I suggest one
should add at least:

------

Run "gpg --version" to obtain the version number.

"gpg" refers to version 1.4.x : this version comes with the cryptography code
linked in statically

"gpg2" refers to version 1.9.x - 2.0.x : these versions use shared object

libraries for cryptography code

There may be other differences I am not aware of, of course...