Re: Fix needed for communication with gpg-agent

[Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     > Roughly speaking, when Emacs is run in a console (i.e. as a curses
>     > program), it monopolizes terminal input and output.  I don't know of
>     > any way to call the curses version of pinentry, have it temporarily
>     > "take over" the terminal, and return control to Emacs once it's done.
>
>     Well, if Emacs just "sleeps" while it waits for gpg to finish, then we
>
> I think the issue is about process groups and job control.
> When pinentry runs, will it be ABLE to write to the tty?

Whatever pinentry writes is garbled when Emacs refreshes the tty
screen.  The more serious problem, however, is that pinentry cannot
READ from the tty since Emacs gobbles all tty input.

The only sane way to handle this is to run gpg in a terminal emulator,
but that is a rather big job.  Since it's unknown whether such an
approach is secure anyway, I suggest disabling passphrase caching on
the console and leaving the pinentry-on-the-console issue till after
the release.