[pkg-gnupg-maint] Bug#791364: Bug#791364: No gpg-agent is started unless 'use-agent' is explicitly configured

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Fri 2015-07-03 16:43:34 -0400, Michael Biebl wrote:

> This is a followup for the changes I made in gnome-keyring to use
> pinentry-gnome3 and gpg-agent [1]
>
> We have important regressions with the new setup:
> A default ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf does not set "use-agent".
> As a result, /etc/X11/Xsession.d/90gpg-agent won't start a gpg-agent on
> session login.
>
> a/ without a running gpg-agent, gpg v2 doesn't cache any passwords. It
> spawns a gpg-agent process on demand, so we at least get a
> pinentry-gnome3 based prompt.
>
> b/ without "use-agent", gpg v1 will also not use gpg-agent/pinentry-gnome3
> at all, but fall back to prompt directly on the console.
>
> Regarding gpg v2 I'm surprised that "use-agent" is still necessary.
> At least "man gpg2" says that --use-agent is a dummy, since gnupg agent
> is mandatory
>
> Any clever idea how we can address this? Should we start gpg-agent
> unconditionally in /etc/X11/Xsession.d/90gpg-agent? This would at least
> address a/.

with 2.1.x (now in experimental, hopefully to move to unstable later
this week), gpg2 will resolve (a) by starting a long-running gpg-agent
process instead of a short-lived one.

        --dkg