One of my eventual goals is to have julie replace all the features of wh4 (libby’s query bot) and foafbot (edd’s community IRC bot). One thing that edd’s bot did that julie doesn’t is to verify data based on signed documents, and to use this information as a “provenance” for the data: not just “where was it said”, but actually verifying “who said it”. <\/p>\n
Dealing with GPG is not nearly as easy as I really think it should be. Take Redland as an example: You can interact with the library at all kinds of levels, from the base swig wrapper to the hand-written RDF.py module wrapped around it, and you can do just about anything the base library does from within Python.<\/p>\n
GPG, on the other hand, is very hard to work with from a library level. There is a Python module for working with GPG, but it equates to simply using the command line tool in the end. You can’t tell it “Check this document”: you basically just have tools to create a pipe to GPG, and pass the options in the same way you would on the command line. Add to that that it’s Yet Another Dependancy which is somewhat of a pain to resolve in Python, and you can see why it’s slightly annoying for people who might want to use GPG.<\/p>\n
Wondering what edd had done for FOAFbot<\/a> back when it was running, I decided to grab his code and play with it. Turns out he just opened a pipe to gpg using the commands module<\/a> in Python. This seemed simple enough to me, so I ripped out some of his code and turned it into a little script.<\/p>\n