[1.7] ITP: libassuan

[Charles Wilson]

This is the IPC library used by GnuPG 2, GPGME and a few other packages.
It used to be included with the latter packages but we decided to make
your life not too easy and separated it out to a stand alone library.

It is currently not intended to be used as a shared library.

This version does not provide libassuan-pth (a change which requires
some modifications in GnuPG2) because GNU Pth on cygwin does not support
clients which use fork.  An IPC library, by definition, involves clients
that fork.  Therefore, the binary package doesn't include the pth
variant of libassuan on cygwin (it is built, just not included in the
binary package). This will change once GNU Pth on cygwin is fixed
(expected sometime after cygwin-1.7.1 is released.)

cygwin libassuan has one other cygwin-specific deficiency, but it seems
that this does not impact GnuPG2's usage. cygwin (as of 1.7.0-62) does
not support "passing file descriptors over unix sockets (streams) so
that a process can share its file descriptors with another":
  http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2009-10/msg00397.html
  http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2007-01/msg00693.html
  http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2004-01/msg00060.html
This means that some functions of libassuan do not work properly on
cygwin. It is not expected that this cygwin behavior will change, so
this deficit will in all likelihood persist. Fortunately, it does not
appear that GnuPG2 requires this facility.

libassuan is a prerequisite for GnuPG2.  There is only one internal
self-test, which fails because it specifically tests the "passing file
descriptors" problem described above.  However, the (modified) GnuPG2
distribution appears basically to work, and that exercises far more of
libassuan than the simple 'fdpassing.exe' test does.


libassuan is included in debian stable and testing:
http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libassuan
and Fedora 11
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/packages/name/libassuan?#Fedora11



http://cygutils.fruitbat.org/ITP-gnupg2/release/libassuan/libassuan-1.0.5-1-src.tar.bz2
http://cygutils.fruitbat.org/ITP-gnupg2/release/libassuan/libassuan-1.0.5-1.tar.bz2
http://cygutils.fruitbat.org/ITP-gnupg2/release/libassuan/libassuan-devel/libassuan-devel-1.0.5-1.tar.bz2
http://cygutils.fruitbat.org/ITP-gnupg2/release/libassuan/libassuan-devel/setup.hint
http://cygutils.fruitbat.org/ITP-gnupg2/release/libassuan/setup.hint


====== libassuan-devel setup.hint =====
requires: libpth-devel
category: Devel Libs
external-source: libassuan
sdesc: "IPC library used by GnuPG2 (devel)"
ldesc: "Libassuan is the IPC library used by GnuPG2, GPGME
and a few other packages."

====== libassuan setup.hint =====
requires: libassuan-devel
category: Doc
sdesc: "IPC library used by GnuPG2"
ldesc: "Libassuan is the IPC library used by GnuPG2, GPGME
and a few other packages."

OK?

--
Chuck