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

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

Hi Tiziano--

thanks for following up here!  I'm closing the bug report as you
recommended, but i wanted to add a little more followup in case someone
else reads this.

On Thu 2018-10-25 13:03:12 +0200, Tiziano Zito wrote:
> 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.

I'm glad to hear that installing dbus-user-session fixed the issue.  I'm
inclined to make dbus-user-session a hard Depends: of pinentry-gnome3
instead of a Recommends: to avoid future problems like this.  What would
you think of that change?

> 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...

this is strange to me, because i think nfs-kernel-server.service is a
system service, and gpg-agent.{service,socket} (from the gpg-agent
package) and dbus.{service,socket} (from the dbus-user-session package)
are user services -- they shouldn't have any direct interaction, and
they're actually managed by entirely different systemd instances.

> 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.

This does seem possible to me, but i don't understand how it would
interact with nfs-kernel-server.service unless there is some sort of
more general operating system race condition.

At any rate, i'm glad to hear that dbus-user-session fixed the issue for
you!  do you have any reason that you don't want to just leave it
installed?

Thanks for all the debugging and documentation!

       --dkg
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