That’s the reality of working with GPG when the feature you need doesn’t exist yet. You dig through man pages. You scan bug trackers. You find an old mailing list thread from 2012, half-buried, hinting that someone else asked for it once. Then nothing. Silence. The feature request sits somewhere between a patch and a dream.
GPG is powerful. It’s also ossified in places that matter most. Feature requests live in a strange territory — critical for security workflows, yet often sidelined. Teams hit walls trying to integrate with modern CI/CD pipelines, handle large keyrings, or manage automated key expiration gracefully. Scripts break on edge cases. Automation grinds to a halt when GPG prompts for a passphrase it shouldn’t.
The pain points repeat. Better JSON output. Clearer exit codes. Native multi-recipient encryption without triple-wrapping files. Smarter handling of expired keys in batch mode. Predictable behavior when imported keys collide. Detailed, machine-friendly error reporting for large-scale cryptographic operations. These aren’t niche ideas; they’re common operational gaps.