How do I safely uninstall gnupg?

Question

Warned by Enigmail they soon won't support gnupg and switch to gnupg2 I installed the later.

Now trying to remove gnupg, I see a bunch of software will be removed as a consequence:

apt apturl enigmail (!) nautilus-share python-software-properties seahorse software-center (=:q) software-properties-common+-gtk ubuntu-desktop+-extra-keyring+-minimal and unattended-upgrades.

A big bit frightening isn't it? So the title question.

Solution 1

You neither must remove GnuPG (1) installed as gpg, nor can safely. It can safely coexist with GnuPG 2 installed as gpg2, which is supported by Enigmail.

The "old" GnuPG version 1 gpg is still used intensively by Ubuntu's (and Debian's) package management system and is not ready to be replaced by GnuPG 2 yet, at least doing so is not officially supported and might break your system.

Solution 2

GnuPG is an important part of the system and used for example by the package manager. You can't remove it without breaking the system.

Comments

[muru]

Why do you want to remove it? Does keeping it installed force Enigmail to use it?

[s.d]

It would be helpful to have the possibility to update this information from official sources at any time. Is there a website or similar where this can be tracked?

[Jens Erat]

This Q&A is form 2015 -- in the last two years, a reasonable number of packages has been migrated from using GnuPG 1.4 to GnuPG 2.0/2.1. In fact, more and more distributions ship GnuPG 2.1 as gpg, while GnuPG 1.4 is installed as gpg1. As far as I know (but I haven't checked recently), Ubuntu (and Debian) is using GnuPG 2.0/2.1 in the package manager for day-to-day usage, but some development tools still rely on the old version.