Re: Help! I messed up guix-past

[Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net>]

Hi Simon and Ludo,

zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> writes:

> I do not know.  For now, nothing is “broken” and I get:
>
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> $ cat /tmp/channels.scm
> (cons*
>  (channel
>   (name 'past)
>   (url "https://gitlab.inria.fr/guix-hpc/guix-past.git")
>   (branch "master"))
>  %default-channels)

Your channel definition doesn't include the introduction, so it's normal
that you have no authentication issues - you are using guix-past
unauthenticated. That's also what I am doing at the moment, as a
workaround.

Ludovic Courtès <ludovic.courtes@inria.fr> writes:

> I understand the feelings—OpenPGP in general but also GPG make for a
> unpleasant user experience coupled with a steep learning curve, and few
> reach the top of that curve (I haven’t).

Me neither (and I am not motivated to get there). But it's worse for me,
because I have no password protection on my keys. Anyone who grabs my
laptop can do whatever they like with my keys. Or rather "could",
because I have moved everything to an encrypted disk partition that I
mount only when required. But that's a real pain to use.

I spent a lot of time on this problem, and reached the conclusion that
it's the existence of two different versions of GnuPG that causes the
trouble. GnuPG then picks up the wrong version of gpg-agent, discovers a
version mismatch, and gives up on password checking. A rather strange
way to handle security!

Unfortunately I can't uninstall either of my two versions. One is from
Ubuntu, the other from Guix, and both are dependencies of other packages
in their respective package universes. Even running GnuPG in a container
doesn't help.

Cheers,
  Konrad