Re: Fix needed for communication with gpg-agent

[Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>]

Werner Koch <wk@gnupg.org> writes:

>> Admittedly, it is a rather naughty solution: GPG is called through an
>> elisp terminal (as implemented by `make-term' in term.el), with a
>> modified process filter whose purpose is to send GPG the string to be
>
> With all that code running in emacs, I doubt that it makes sense at
> all to use the curses versions of Pinentry.

In that case, I think Emacs should disable use of gpg-agent when
running in a console, except when gpg-agent already has a passphrase
cached.  Then all we need is some method for Emacs to determine if the
necessary passphrase is cached.  If gpg-agent does not have the
passphrase, Emacs will then prompting for the passphrase and send it
to GPG, without caching it in Elisp (i.e. subsequent calls to GPG will
require entering the passphrase again).

> Is it possible to enhance server-start/emacsclient so that it does not
> edit a file but asks for string and returns that one?  Pinentry could
> then use this feature for user interaction.

I'm not sure how this suggestion could work.