Re: epa.texi: Emacs and GnuPG pinentry

[Filipp Gunbin <fgunbin@fastmail.fm>]

Hi Jens,

On 05/07/2023 00:13 +0200, Jens Schmidt wrote:

[...]

> What puzzled me during my first-time setup were the different modes of
> Emacs as GnuPG Pinentry.  Basically you can have for GnuPG >= 2.1:
>
> 1. Use Emacs only for GnuPG requests that are triggered by Emacs itself
>    (aka loopback pinentry),
>
> 2. use Emacs for *all* GnuPG requests (also non-Emacs ones), or
>
> 3. use Emacs for all GnuPG requests with some other non-Emacs Pinentry
>    as fallback.
>
> The latter two alternatives require pinentry.el, which was present in
> Emacs core only in versions [25, ..., 27] (see
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2018-01/msg00233.html).
> Plus they are not supported on Debian.
>
> While some users may consider alternatives 2. and 3. desirable I'm not
> sure whether I should describe their setup in detail in epa.texi.  I
> could just mention them and that "they are not recommended for use".  Or
> whatever.
>
> WDYT?

I think that putting (setq epg-pinentry-mode 'loopback) into .emacs is
all that should be needed.  BTW, we could think of making this value the
default.

Filipp