gpg-agent with gpg4win 1.9.0

[Marcus Brinkmann]

At Mon, 19 May 2008 18:10:24 +0200,
Patrick Brunschwig <patrick at mozilla-enigmail.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am assessing gpg4win 1.9.0 in order to prepare for supporting gpg2 in
> Enigmail on Windows, once gpg4win v2.0 will officially be released.
> 
> Now I have found that gpg-agent on Windows doesn't detach when started
> with --daemon.
> 
> Is this something that will be fixed, or am I missing something?

You mean if invoked from the command line, right?  The way this works
in Windows for us is that the process invoking the agent starts the
process in detached mode.  I don't understand every detail about
process execution under Windows.  Maybe it is possible for the
gpg-agent to do it as well, or maybe there would need to be hints in
the gpg-agent.exe file to instruct the console to do it (but note that
we don't want the console to always detach it, as gpg-agent can be
usefully invoked on the command line).  The way we do it is that all
tools that start the agent in daemon mode use something like
gnupg_spawn_process_detached which sets the DETACHED_PROCESS and
CREATE_NEW_PROCESS_GROUP flags in CreateProcess.

If you have a particular suggestion how invoking gpg-agent --daemon
from the command line can be improved, please let us know.

In general, you can just let gpg/gpgsm etc take care of starting
gpg-agent on demand.  There are a couple of corner cases where a
gpg-agent is not started on demand yet (the protect tool for P12 comes
to mind), but we will have to fix them.  Users of gpg or gpgsm need
not be concerned about gpg-agent.

Thanks,
Marcus