gpg-agent, pinentry and Emacs

[Ralph Seichter]

* Werner Koch:

> INSIDE_EMACS support is in GnUPG since 2.1.5 (4 years ago). It seems
> that for whatever reasons Emacs does not pass that envvar on.

Perhaps I need to build Emacs "by hand" to get full control over all
options, instead of relying on the existing Gentoo ebuild. Not that I
want to do that. :-/

> log-file /somwhere/gpg-agent.log

Thanks. I did that, and also added 'verbose'. The output does not tell
me much, though:

gpg-agent[27187]: handler 0x7f85114d4700 for fd 9 started
gpg-agent[27187]: starting a new PIN Entry
gpg-agent[27187]: handler 0x7f850bfff700 for fd 16 started
gpg-agent[27187]: handler 0x7f850bfff700 for fd 16 terminated
gpg-agent[27187]: failed to unprotect the secret key: Timeout
gpg-agent[27187]: failed to read the secret key
gpg-agent[27187]: command 'PKDECRYPT' failed: Timeout <Pinentry>
gpg-agent[27187]: Assuan processing failed: Broken pipe
gpg-agent[27187]: handler 0x7f85114d4700 for fd 9 terminated
gpg-agent[27187]: handler 0x7f850bfff700 for fd 12 started
gpg-agent[27187]: handler 0x7f850bfff700 for fd 12 terminated
gpg-agent[27187]: handler 0x7f85114d4700 for fd 12 started
gpg-agent[27187]: handler 0x7f85114d4700 for fd 12 terminated
[...]

I did try to enter my pass phrase, but my interpretation of the above
timeout is that my input never made it back to gpg-agent?

I am not quite sure how to best debug this further. In my OP I mentioned
trying to have pinentry in a separate, dedicated terminal? Is that
possible, and if so, how would I set it up? Like I wrote, setting
GPG_TTY to a fixed value only works for a single time.

-Ralph