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

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Sun 2016-11-06 04:25:27 -0500, Vincent Lefevre <vincent at vinc17.net> wrote:
> 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.

It is indeed automatic -- it falls back when it is unable to communicate
with a gnome3 prompter, which happens via d-bus.

>> 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.

DISPLAY has nothing to do with how pinentry-gnome3 works.
pinentry-gnome3 does not communicate with any X11 session -- it
communicates with a d-bus 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.

It sounds like you are expecting the beahvior of pinentry-gtk-2 (which
does indeed talk directly to an X11 display), but using pinentry-gnome3
instead (which talks instead to a d-bus session).  We could make
pinentry-gnome3 test for the presence of DISPLAY, and fall back if it is
unset, but why would we do this, if pinentry-gnome3 doesn't even assume
X11?  If a user runs gnome3 in some non-x11 environment (wayland?  i
don't know specifically), should pinentry-gnome3 fall back to curses,
even when it can provide a graphical prompt?

Perhaps you mean to be using pinentry-gtk-2?

Still at a loss as to how to resolve this bug report satisfactorily,

        --dkg

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