Is a .gnupg directory /w write access mandatory?

[Joe Schulz]

Hello all,

I am trying to use gnupg in a boot script for a high-security boot 
process. It only has to decrypt an ascii-armored symmetric ciphertext 
but at the moment it fails miserably because gnupg seems to ultimately 
demand write access to some .gnupg directory even if it is not needed 
for the task at all!
At that point in the boot process there is no writable file system 
whatsoever because we still need to decrypt those keys for the file 
systems to mount! Talk about tail biting...
I'd rather not mount a RAM-disk just for the purpose of getting around 
this, so is there some - maybe undocumented - way to make gnupg just 
decrypt my file and skip the ".gnupg" issue?

Thanks in advance,
			Joe