Situation
At the moment Debian is shipping GnuPG 2.2.45-2 in sid aka unstable and 2.4.7-1 in experimental. Ubuntu is shipping 2.4.4-2ubuntu17 in noble aka 24.04 LTS. GnuPG upstream announced end of live of version 2.2 (LTS) to be 2024-12-31 while birth of version 2.4 was 2021-04-07 and birth of version 2.6 was 2024-07-05 already. Is it possible to use a more modern version of GnuPG with a Debian based system but without doing too much complicated stuff? SHIMPS addresses this question and offers an additional Debian style repository which can be used with apt style tools (e.g. aptitude or synaptic).
Debian style apt repository
There is a Debian style SHIMPS Software repository available, which can be used to install the GnuPG 2.4 (stable) and 2.5 (developer) versions via the package system. The software is precompiled from the unpatched upstream vanilla ressources.
Packages
shimps-gnupg
The package shimps-gnupg provides the stable version 2.4 together with the extracted tarball in /opt/shimps/shimps-gnupg/ (126M). At the moment it's just a lazy compilation with
./configure make
and symlinks in /opt/shimps/bin/. All files are below /opt/shimps/ to prevent conflicts with the distribution.
shimps-gnupg-ng
The package shimps-gnupg-ng provides the developer version 2.5 with libraries, which can be considered as kind of a self contained setup.
make -f build-aux/speedo.mk this-native make -f build-aux/speedo.mk install SYSROOT=$whereitbelongs
All files are below /opt/local/shimps/ to prevent conflicts with the distribution.
shimps-keyring
The package shimps-keyring provides future updates of the signing key(s). At the moment it contains only a single file
$ apt-file show shimps-keyring shimps-keyring: /etc/apt/keyrings/shimps-signing-2024.gpg
which must be installed manually (see below) in any case before first usage of the repositoty, but it is strongly recommended to install this package anyway to avoid future problems with possibly changing keyrings.
Installation
Installation is pretty easy (you need administration privileges), first the author's favourite tools:
apt-get update apt-get install aptitude aptitude update aptitude safe-upgrade aptitude install apt-file apt-file update apt-cache search shimps apt-file find shimps
The last two commands won't show anything since nothing related to shimps is installed yet. Now the important part:
cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d wget https://software.shimps.net/debian/shimps.list cd /etc/apt/keyrings wget https://software.shimps.net/keys/gnupg/shimps-signing-2024.gpg aptitude update apt-file update apt-cache search shimps apt-file find shimps/bin apt-cache show shimps-gnupg apt-cache show shimps-gnupg-ng apt-cache show shimps-keyring aptitude install shimps-keyring aptitude install shimps-gnupg aptitude install shimps-gnupg-ng
Usage
To set a usage preference at user level (a good time to drop administration privileges now) you might want to add two lines to your user bashrc configuration file (be careful when doing this with adminstration privileges, which should't be necessary at all):
gpg --version echo 'PATH=/opt/local/shimps/bin:/opt/shimps/bin:${PATH}' >> ~/.bashrc echo 'export PATH' >> ~/.bashrc bash gpg --version
If you want the system, e.g. package system related tools, to use the modern versions, you need to change system settings in /etc. This is recommended to experienced users and admins only.