[pkg-gnupg-maint] Bug#911768: Bug#911768: pinentry-gnome3 fails to open a window with 'No Gcr System Prompter available, falling back to curses'

[Tiziano Zito]

Hi Daniel,

On Wed 24 Oct, 18:15 -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg at fifthhorseman.net> wrote:
>> Versions of packages pinentry-gnome3 recommends:
>> pn  dbus-user-session  <none>
>
>can you try installing dbus-user-session, then log out and log back in
>and let me know whether it works in that case?

after some hours of debugging, I found the culprit.

It has nothing to do with pinentry. Given that I have a system with almost 
identical setup without dbus-user-session where everything works, and given that 
installing dbus-user-session in the affected system fixed the issue, I started 
digging deeper.

For the record, in case in the future anyone hits the same problem: The only 
difference between the affected system and the working one was that the affected 
system starts nfs-kernel-server.service on boot. This was not only delaying the 
boot process (whish is somewhat expected) but additionaly the order changed in 
which systemd services were started, resulting in a different order than the one 
in the working system. I couldn't pin down exactly what service was the 
problematic one, but disabling the nfs-kernel-server.service fixed the pinentry 
issue...

Given that installing dbus-user-session fixed the issue independent of 
nfs-kernel-server being enabled or not, I assume that the problem may be due to 
gpg-agent starting *before* dbus in the non dbus-user-session scenario, but I am 
only guessing.

You can close the bug as not-a-bug, I'd say.

Thanks!
Tiziano