bug#8791: 23.3; EasyPG: pinentry in remote emacs session without X

[Daiki Ueno]

"Roland Winkler" <winkler@gnu.org> writes:

> On Fri Jun 3 2011 Daiki Ueno wrote:
>> Well I think pinentry should fallback to use curses in this case.
>> However it is not currently possible since there is no way to get the
>> tty where Emacs is running.  See:
>> 
>> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/96207
>
> I do not know much about the internals of gpg. I was wondering: for
> gpg, is there anything similar to the ssh-add command, which could
> serve as a fallback?

I suspect that gpg command installed on your remote system is GPG2,
which is tightly coupled with gpg-agent (and thus pinentry) for secret
key operations by its design.

Assuming that, I could imagine a couple of (insecure) workarounds:

1. install both GPG1 and GPG2
2. keep using GPG2 and write a pinentry program which retrieves
  passphrase via emacsclient.

Generally I'd recommend 1, since most distros provide both packages,
which can be installed with no conflict.

Regards,
-- 
Daiki Ueno