Re: Controlling gpg-agent from Emacs

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 06 Dec 2013 09:49:47 +0000 Alex Bennée <kernel-hacker@bennee.com> 
wrote: 

AB> tzz@lifelogs.com writes:

>> On Tue, 03 Dec 2013 09:12:53 +0000 Alex Bennée <kernel-hacker@bennee.com> 
>> wrote: 
>> 
AB> <snip>
AB> Reading through the gpg-agent docs seems to imply it should be possible
AB> to feed your passphrase to the agent ahead of time so it's ready to run
AB> the decryption when gnupg is invoked (gpg-preset-passphrase). However I
AB> can't get that to work (gpg-agent seems to think it's an unsupported
AB> command).
>> 
AB> I also found a shell script (https://github.com/ecraven/pinentry-emacs)
AB> which seems to use emacsclient to prompt for a passphrase but the page
AB> was loaded with enough caveats I haven't tried it yet.
>> 
AB> Has anyone else got a better solution?
>> 
>> What version of GPG?

AB> gnupg 2.0.20-1ubuntu3
AB> gnupg-agent 2.0.20-1ubuntu3

AB> I take it this option was removed?

Yeah, I complained about it too but from another angle (you can't cache
the EPA/EPG passphrase in Emacs anymore, like you could with GnuPG 1.x).
Based on Daiki Ueno's explanations in emacs-devel[1] and in the bug
reports[2] , I don't think we can expect improvements for the users
here (it's a conscious decision by the GnuPG project).

To avoid depending on the GnuPG project's decisions and for other
reasons I want to implement native encryption in Emacs and submitted
patches to that end.  Stefan requested that we get external loading of
libraries through FFI and other mechanisms working first[3].  This is a
much more complex task and AFAIK no one bu me wants to implement it.  So
it will take a while; help is welcome.  Meanwhile the best advice is to
downgrade to GnuPG 1.x.

Ted

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-10/msg00075.html
[2] http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=15552
[3] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-10/msg00168.html