[pkg-gnupg-maint] Bug#842015: Merging bugs about pinentry failing without GNOME-connected d-bus

Vincent Lefevre vincent at vinc17.net
Sun Nov 6 09:25:27 UTC 2016


On 2016-11-06 01:13:53 -0500, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> If you want a pinentry that only speaks curses (and never tries to
> integrate with a gnome3 session), you should install pinentry-curses and
> either remove pinentry-gnome3, or place "pinentry-program
> /usr/bin/pinentry-curses" in your gpg-agent.conf.

I expect that the fallback to curses be automatic.

> One additional exacerbating factor that you're seeing is probably due to
> the fact that pinentry-gnome3 doesn't currently respect the default
> timeout.

No, this is not a timeout issue, as a window is opened on the
X display, while it should never do that when DISPLAY is unset.

> I have patches queued that will respect the timeout that will
> be uploaded shortly as 0.9.7-8, though.

This doesn't change anything (I haven't rebooted the machine this
time, but anyway, only the pinentry-* packages were upgraded).

> It's not clear to me what you actually want to happen here (which is why
> i've tagged this bug report with "moreinfo").  Can you help me
> understand?  Over on https://bugs.gnupg.org/gnupg/issue2818 i discuss
> the corner case where there is an active gnome3 session but it is
> screen-locked; pinentry-gnome3 could be made to fall back to curses in
> that scenario as well (by querying the state of the gnome screensaver),
> but that still wouldn't change the scenario that you describe above:
> 
>   if the user is connected to an active gnome3 session, and they are
>   talking to gpg-agent which is configured to use pinentry-gnome3,
>   gpg-agent's prompt will appear on the active gnome3 session.
> 
> Can you explain what you'd rather happen here?

I don't use GNOME at all, so this isn't this scenario. But the above
would not be OK for GNOME & SSH users anyway. IMHO, what matters is
whether DISPLAY is set or not, and its value when it is set.
Displaying the prompt on a different screen does not make sense.

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Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
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