Problems attemoting to use GPG with a USB watch

[David Shaw]

On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 03:35:07AM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Adam Cripps <kabads at gmail.com>:
> > > instead of setting $GNUPGHOME, have you tried just setting
> > > 
> > > 'secret keyring /path/to/secring.gpg'
> > > 
> > > in your gpg.conf file? I did this the other day (with a similar
> > > present) and it works fine for me.
> > > 
> > 
> > Hehe -- it's too early here - that should read
> > 
> > 'secret-keyring /path/to/secring.gpg'
> 
> Thanks, I'll try that.  It would still be nice to know why the locking
> thing didn't work, though.

I don't think this will work without further effort (or at least, I'd
be rather surprised if it did).  Perhaps Adam's secring.gpg is
read-only.

The reason why the locking didn't work is that your watch is formatted
as a VFAT filesystem, as David Champion guessed.  GnuPG uses link() as
part of its file locking scheme, and VFAT doesn't support links.

You have a number of options, one is to use --lock-never as David
Champion suggested; you will of course have to take care not to run
two instances of gpg at the same time.  The other option is to make
the secret keyring read-only.  Read-only files have no need for locks,
and thus are ignored by the locking code.  Of course, read-only files
are read-only, so that may not be useful to you if you want to
actually manipulate your keyring on the watch frequently.  Or you
could reformat your watch as ext2 or 3 (or really, anything that
supports hard links).

David