On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 5:33 AM, Werner Koch <w...@gnupg.org> wrote: > On Mon, 14 May 2012 23:53, avi.w...@gmail.com said: > >> anything to work, as I am not able to figure out how to us gpgconf to >> switch sysconfdir to my stick's drive, and everything else is failing > > The directory is determined by looking at CSIDL_COMMON_APPDATA. It > seems you can change the value by changing the environment variable > APPDATA. However, I am not sure whether this is a documented feature.
Thank you; I didn't see this in the manual. I'm loathe to change it though as that probably affects many programs on the hosting computer, and may cause many other programs to go a bit haywire. > A quick test shows that a wrong value for APPDATA returns an error and > thus gnupg will use a value based on the actual modules directory. > > What do you think of an environment variable to explicitly force the use > of the installation directory (i.e the USB stick). Instead of an envvar > we could also check the presence of a marker file in the installation > directory, to disable all use of default locations. Both things are > easy to implement. Speaking for myself, I think I would prefer the latter to the former, as I would prefer to have a Windows installation that is (as much as possible) completely divorced from the hosting computer and results in a GnuPG installation that is as "portable" as possible between trusted computers. This would mean minimizing or eliminating any reference to environment variable OR having the launch of the program/GUI setting them temporarily each time if necessary. Allowing an option to have the home and other helper directories configured as a subfolder of the install directory on the install should be helpful as well. What I have now with 1.4.x is the ability to plug my stick into any trusted computer, fire up Truecrypt, mount the encrypted drive, and use a GUI to sign, encrypt, and decrypt the clipboard or files, manage keys (including signing, generating revoke certs, etc.) and pretty much using a GUI to handle most command-line actions of gpg. > I don't know how the USB stick approach works with the Outlook and > Explorer plugins - they need to have registry entries. Agreed. Having a portable installation would preclude integration with other programs, so the Outlook and Explorer extensions would not be installed in such a situation. In my current 1.4.12 install, for example, I do not have shell integration or plugins to other programs, which is fine, as who is to say that a program on trusted computer A is installed on trusted computer B. Once again, thank you. --Avi ---- User:Avraham pub 3072D/F80E29F9 1/30/2009 Avi (Wikimedia-related key) <avi.w...@gmail.com> Primary key fingerprint: 167C 063F 7981 A1F6 71EC ABAA 0D62 B019 F80E 29F9 _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users