What's a good example of showcasing the advantage of gnupg2 over gnupg?

Question

• Q1) What's a good example of showcasing the advantage of gnupg2 over gnupg?

• Q2) I'm trying to build encryption into a small piece of software for internal project management. Is gnupg a good tool to use for that? Is gnupg2 better for any reasons?

Answer 1

According to the GNUpg website

GnuPG comes in two flavours: 1.4.11 is the well known and portable standalone version, whereas 2.0.18 is the enhanced and somewhat harder to build version.

The release notes say

1.4.11 is the stable version of GnuPG. (2.0.18 is the unstable development version).

For 2.0

GnuPG-2 has a different architecture than GnuPG-1 (e.g. 1.4.5) in that it splits up functionality into several modules. However, both versions may be installed alongside without any conflict. In fact, the gpg version from GnuPG-1 is able to make use of the gpg-agent as included in GnuPG-2 and allows for seamless passphrase caching. The advantage of GnuPG-1 is its smaller size and the lack of dependency on other modules at run and build time. We will keep maintaining GnuPG-1 versions because they are very useful for small systems and for server based applications requiring only OpenPGP support.

If you read through the notes for each release you will build up a good picture of what features are in 2.x that are not in 1.x. E.g. support for smart-cards.