[pkg-gnupg-maint] Bug#850657: Bug#850657: gnupg: Please find gpg-agent on PATH

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

Control: tags 850657 + moreinfo
Control: severity 850657 wishlist

On Sun 2017-01-08 17:35:13 -0500, Ian Jackson wrote:
> gpg executes /usr/bin/gpg-agent, rather than fetching it from the
> PATH.
>
> This is contrary to Debian policy.

Can you point to the specific part of debian policy that this violates?

> (This behaviour got in my way because I wanted to pass exciting
> options to gpg-agent, which involved contortions.)

If you want to pass exciting options to gpg-agent, you can pass them
directly by launching the agent by hand.  there aren't many contortions
involved, afaict.  Can you explain what you're trying to do?

> Please change the package to execute all its programs from PATH.

this almost certainly won't be done.  for example, if a smarcard is
present, scdaemon is currently invoked from /usr/lib/gnupg/scdaemon ,
which isn't even in the path.

> Ideally upstream would change too but my experience is that upstreams
> often don't like this kind of change.

indeed, they don't like changes that make it more difficult to track
down problems, and knowing that the binary you're executing is the one
that was built with the one that you're running isn't a totally
unreasonable expectation.

There are lots of systems where users install some who-knows-what
variant of gpg in /usr/local, and it's entirely reasonable for
/usr/local/bin/gpg to want to execute /usr/local/bin/gpg-agent, while
/usr/bin/gpg might want to execute /usr/bin/gpg-agent.  (this kind of
approach would indeed raise a concern for future use of gpg once the
agent is running of course, but that's a separate issue, and one not
fixed by relying on $PATH either)

Can you explain more about why you need this?  I'm happy to help you
figure out what you want in general, but the argument for this change in
the moment seems pretty abstract.

        --dkg
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