[MlMt] gpg best practice

akierig akierig at fastmail.de
Wed Jan 22 04:06:54 EST 2025


On 2025-01-21 (KW 04) at 15:52:07 (-0600) Ben Hyde wrote:

> 1. “Gpg” eh?  What about “gpg2” … my memory is that last 
> time I did this I used gpg2.
> 2. “/usr/local/bin” eh?  I thought the brew folks moved to 
> /opt/homebrew/bin on Apple Silicon.
> 3. I seem to remember solving this, at last once, with a symbolic link 
> to where I found gpg installed, but that was a longtime ago.

if you install `gnupg2` with MacPorts, ie., the current standard version 
of GPG/PGP/whatever-the-hell-its-called, it installs to 
`/opt/local/bin/gpg`. There's nothing stopping you from just doing 
something like `sudo ln -s $(which gpg) /usr/local/bin/gpg`. I have had 
gpg symlinked like that for many versions of Mac OS and it's been fine. 
I'm on an M4 mini on Mac OS 15.x

> 4a.  Of course mailMate runs as a child/spawn, of launchd.  Luck me I 
> already know how to set environment variable in launchd for this kind 
> of thing.

It would be a significantly more complicated and unwieldy thing to try 
and set an environmental variable for a single application that does not 
run as a service that needs to be initiated by `launchd` on boot.

> 4b. Then I found an email that mentioned using “defaults set” to 
> inject this info into mailmate
>    defaults write com.freron.MailMate environmentVariables -array 
> '{enabled = :true;  name = "MM_GPG"; value = "/opt/homebrew/bin/gpg"; 
> }'

I just tried running `defaults read com.freron.MailMate` but didn't see 
anything to suggest setting environmental variables.

Try mailmate's help for 'Hidden Preferences' and 'Low Level 
Customization'? that will help you navigate the MacOS `defaults` stuff.

> So at point I seemed reasonably to ask if this was written down 
> someplace.
>
> If not, I’ll just kick it until something works :)

Personally I'd symlink wherever the `gpg` (or whatever homebrew calls 
the installed binary) is to `/usr/local/bin/gpg` and not worry about it. 
Don't overthink it.

ander
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