bug#29906: 27.0.50; Emacs prompts for passwords in GUI dialog instead of minibuffer

[nljlistbox2@gmail.com (N. Jackson)]

At 10:19 +0200 on Saturday 2017-12-30, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>
> Does this NEWS.26 entry help?
>
>   ** The pinentry.el library has been removed.
>   That package (and the corresponding change in GnuPG and pinentry)
>   was intended to provide a way to input passphrase through Emacs with
>   GnuPG 2.0.  However, the change to support that was only implemented
>   in GnuPG >= 2.1 and didn't get backported to GnuPG 2.0.  And with
>   GnuPG 2.1 and later, pinentry.el is not needed at all.  So the
>   library was useless, and we removed it.  GnuPG 2.0 is no longer
>   supported by the upstream project.
>
>   To adapt to the change, you may need to set 'epa-pinentry-mode' to the
>   symbol 'loopback'.

Yes, that does help, thank you. I should have checked the news.

It doesn't help me decide what to do though. Do you know if using
the prompt in the minibuffer (using `loopback') is thought to be
less secure than using the external pinentry program?

> What version of GnuPG do you have on that system?

Here `gpg' is GnuPG 1.4.22 and `gpg2' is GnuPG 2.2.3.

N.