gpa-v-seahorse

I have been asked why I haved installed both seahorse and gpa. the comparison between the 2 softwares is on line at URL http://www.cgsa.net/tomboy/gpa-v-seahorse.html (with a little bit on KGpg and commercial PGP) Both seahorse and gpa softwares provide GnuPG keys management. Seahorse also allows management of SSH keys. Seahorse probably provides a more convenient way to manage GnuPG keys management. E.g. you are able to retrieve keys from servers by searching on a name. Gpa is limited to searching by key ID. Seahorse integrates well with nautilus. So that you can encrypt or sign a file by a simple right click within nautilus. You can decrypt a .pgp file, import a key .asc file or verify a signature .sig file (see however the remark at the end of this note) by a double click. Regarding the sign operation, you don't have a choice for the format of the signature file. I quote Adam Schreiber : "This would probably confuse beginning users. If you know the difference between these cases you can probably punt at the command line." Gpa allows file encryption, decryption,signing or verification thru an internal file manager. These operations are precise. E.g. when you decide to sign a file, you are able to decide the type of signature (my choice is generally an external armoured file), while you are not able to reach this precision with seahorse . (see remark of Adam above) sign and verify signature With seahorse, you can (easely by a right click) sign a file (signature will be a separate binary file) and you double click on the .sig file to verify the signature. However, see below the remark (possible bug) on signature verification with seahorse. With gpa, you can also sign a file (you need to open gpa and then its file manager, etc) (signature may be what you decide) and there is also a tool (in the file manager) to verify a signature. exporting to asc files (+ zip file) With seahorse, you can backup your 2 key rings into a single zip file you can export a set of public keys into an .asc file you can export each private key into an .asc file (On the "My Personal Keys" tab, double click on the key you want to export, select the details tab, click the export button.) if you have multiple private keys, you can NOT export them all into a single .asc file (see remark below) of course, you can import from an .asc file With gpa, you can NOT backup your 2 key rings into a single tar.gz or other file (use seahorse to do this) you can export one public key into an .asc file you should be able to export a set of public keys but currently there is a BUG (thus, use seahorse to do this) https://bugs.g10code.com/gnupg/issue850 you can export (backup) one private key into an .asc file if you have multiple private keys, you can NOT export them all into a single .asc file (see remark below) of course, you can import from an .asc file With KGpg, you can NOT backup your 2 key rings into a single tar.gz or other file (use seahorse to do this) you can export a set of public keys into an .asc file you can NOT export your private key(s) into an .asc file (at least, we did not found how to do this operation) of course, you can import from an .asc file remark related to exporting multiple private keys into a single ascii file : With the commercial product PGP (available for Windows and Mac), it is possible to export a set of keys into an ascii file, and to decide to incorporate, or not, the private part. It is thus possible to export a set of private keys. I must recognize that not many people do manage multiple private keys... remark related to signature verification with seahorse : With Ubuntu 7.04, the association of the .sig file with the correct application is done at installation of seahorse. So, just double-click on the .sig file With Ubuntu 7.10 we meet a problem. The association was not done during the installation (?). We solve the problem by manually associating the .sig file with the command seahorse-tool --verify