Mac OS X 10.8 and OpenPGP Cards

[Kevin Kammer]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 12:00:23PM +0200 Also sprach Olav Seyfarth:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: RIPEMD160
> 
> Hi Kevin, list,
> 
> > I just upgraded from Mac OS X 10.7 to 10.8, and my ZeitControl cards, which
> > were formerly working perfectly, are now inaccessible.
> 
> please note that 10.8 brings significant changes (namely sandboxing) to Mac OS X
> which does have impact on most software. Luke Le from GPGtools posted on 26.07.:
> 
> > I Mountain Lion Mail.app is running in a sandbox which has a deep impact
> > on GPGMail: it can no longer communicate with gpg using a sub process.
> 
> http://support.gpgtools.org/discussions/everything/1573-os-x-108-mountain-lion-compatibility/
> 

Application sandboxing is now mandatory only for applications installed
through the Mac App Store;  applications installed by the root user (or
equivalent) outside of Apple's "official" channels still have free reign
over the whole system, as they always did.

While the information and link quoted above will almost certainly be
helpful for some people with Apple Mail/GPGTools problems, there is
definitely more going on in my case.  For one thing, the problems I have
observed with GnuPG 2.x are present outside of any mail agent, or other
application calling gpg2 (i.e. gpg2 --card-status does not work from the
command line--no mail involved).  Aside from that, I typically
sign/encrypt messages from Mutt, not Apple Mail, so the sandbox is
unlikely to effect me in the near future anyway.

Since I have discovered that GnuPG 1 is mostly usable with my cards at
this point, I will try to soldier on with that, but it's annoying that
GnuPG 2, which was working fine previously, is suddenly such a mess due
to this update.