Though not directly related to our issues, this bug report on the MSYS2 site reported by their users encountering trouble with GPGME provides additional weight to irreconcilable differences between MSYS2 and GnuPG:

Though apparently resolved back in May, this is what ultimately led to T4191 and was thus only properly resolved quite recently.

Confirmed that this is indeed fixed and made the (rather minor) change to the HOWTO that was needed. No changes were needed for the example script (decrypt-file.py).

This has now been tested on a 32-bit Gentoo VM and it behaves as expected with 32-bit system detection and creating keys with pre-2038 expirations working.

Commit 8613727f1ee985c3cfa2c815523312914f033ffd adds considerable detail on both the issues affecting compiling and installing a Windows version of the bindings and what it would take to actually resolve it.

I'll deploy one on AWS somewhere briefly once I've replaced a certain external keyboard, there will almost certainly be an existing image of some Linux distro in the AWS marketplace and I'd be very surprised if it took more than an hour or two of compute time to confirm.

One more semantic question about how folks think Context.decrypt(verify=True) should work: if the decrypted thing has no signature at all, should the function succeed without throwing an exception? it currently does, but the returned verify_result has its signatures member set to the empty list.

Ooh, nice catch @dkg, I just stepped through each of your changes and it all looks good. I'll tweak the relevant sections of the HOWTO dealing with this in the next few days (I need to replace a keyboard here before properly diving back in) and then close this case once done.

since @aheinecke merged my changes, i think this bug is now resolved. I'll let @BenM close it though :)

@aheinecke thanks for the merge of my other branch! sadly, that branch does *not* address this issue yet. It doesn't even test for it. :( I can work on trying to fix it (and test it) if there's a consensus that we want this particular change in behavior.

Is this fixed now?

Ben is not even subscribed to this issue.
With the volatility of gpgme-python I think that this can easily be merged. I did a quick review and it looked good to me.

Needs to be merged. (Note that Phabricator does not show the branch in the tooltip for commit ids.)

note that the branch also updates the test suite to make sure the verify=False case is tested.

I've just pushed a branch dkg/fix-T4271 , currently at ac8d7238dbf165950c9844e5cb41da8eb4d37bc0 that resolves this problem.

Regression introduced with 1.12.0.

please add a unit to the test suite to make sure something like this doesn't happen in the future!

i'd be happy to help you set up your own x86 32-bit guest VM for testing
if you like, even if you're running on x86_64 hardware. they're cheap
and easy to run, and have a delightfully small memory footprint :P just
let me know!

I consider this bug to be solved.

MacPorts doesn't currently ship the bindings at all, but I'll see what they need to make that a reality too.

While this is now ideal for Debian, it may cause conflicts with other downstream vendors with slightly different needs to build their packages. In particular the FreeBSD ports and/or pkg system.

Nesting the op_genkey() calls inside try/except statements with the exceptions being caught as "oops" and otherwise "oops" being set to None provides a means of checking whether the 2099 expiration is a problem and 2037 is not.

Well, I guess this answers my question in T4192 regarding why op_genkey was in use.

Interesting, I'll look into it, but is there a reason for using op_genkey instead of create_key (optionally with create_subkey and/or key_add_uid)? The latter should be easier and more pythonic.

In T3354#118876, @justus wrote:

This should already be possible, iirc the Arch Linux maintainer patched
it in. I believe there is a 'prepare' target that takes care of all the
preparations (duh), and then you can build for every Python version by
executing the Python build system with the Python version of your choice.

@werner, thanks for rMff6ff616aea6 -- i've backported it to debian's packaging and it lets us cleanly build against all installed versions of python.

That is up to @BenM

the error i'd seen earlier after reverting the change was an error due to running t-callbacks.py on its own, without the rest of the test suite framework. running it within the test suite framework (with the change reverted), it passes without a problem. I've uploaded 1.12.0-4 to debian with a patch to t-callbacks.py. I can apply it upstream, if you want me to.

See T4195 for the general problem

I have not looked at the new error but the year 2099 is clearly a y2k38 problem. gpg has some precautions but I have not checked the key generation code. The gpgme interface uses a signed long for the expiration time, although that it parses the dates received from gpg as an unsigned long. Right now, I am not sure why we did this because an unsigned long would just work. Maybe we can change or enhance the interface. But in any case this is a general problem and not specific to this bug.

@BenM thinks that swig is still the best option. Actually this case helped to find a bug in gpgme. See my next commit.

The error might have to do with rM46da79e3de99a7b65748994921d6aab73b9974e7 which looks like it might run afoul of 32-bit time_t (Y2K38 problem?).

here's me running just the specific test:

If the swig interface isn't robust, can we replace it with something that will be more robust? Or do we need to wrap it with hand-crafted error checks that describe the API's constraints? It's pretty bad form to segfault python.

When parms is malformed but not NULL, then the error appears to be a bug in the python bindings in _wrap_gpgme_release. maybe something is going wrong because of the "cannot allocate memory" error? in particular:

That swig based interface is not really robust and it can't be because it does not known about API requirements. I bet there are other places where mandatory parameters are not checked.

To deal with passing None correctly, it looks to me like the problem is inside get_parameter() in src/genkey.c -- there ought to be a check for parms being NULL, and then returning either GPG_ERR_INV_VALUE or something else. otherwise, the segfault happens inside strstr.

It the first error (first param = None) is a segfault in versions 1.11.1-2 (debian unstable i386) and 1.8.0-3+b2 (debian stretch amd64).