[Enigmail] Interactions between gpg-agent and enigmail [was: Re: Enigmail on Ubuntu 9.04]

[Patrick Brunschwig]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> On 05/05/2009 11:19 AM, Patrick Brunschwig wrote:
>> I hate replying to myself, but I forgot one thing here: users are free
>> to disable gpg-agent (or seahorse-agent), therefore removing the
>> corresponding options from Enigmail in Ubuntu is a not a clever thing to do.
> 
> Would it be possible for enigmail to detect whether or not the gpg-agent
> is running?  On GNU/Linux at least, a simple examination of the
> $GPG_AGENT_INFO environment variable should be sufficient.
> 
> According to gpg2(1):
> 
>>        GPG_AGENT_INFO
>>               Used  to  locate  the  gpg-agent.  The value consists of 3 colon
>>               delimited fields: The first is  the  path  to  the  Unix  Domain
>>               Socket,  the  second  the  PID of the gpg-agent and the protocol
>>               version which should be set to 1. When starting the gpg-agent as
>>               described in its documentation, this variable is set to the cor‐
>>               rect value. The option --gpg-agent-info can be used to  override
>>               it.
> 
> Maybe if enigmail detects that the agent is running, it could alter the
> password caching preferences display to clarify the situation.

Right, Enigmail does that. The problem is that this is not sufficient. I
have seen many situations where e.g.GPG_AGENT_INFO was present, but no
gpg-agent was actually running,  or in the following situation: no
gpg-agent is used but the user chooses to use gpg v2.x. In this case,
Enigmail has to start a gpg-agent. As said, I have changed the
preferences dialog recently; the user is now alerted in case a gpg-agent
is detected that the idle times might not be respected.

- -Patrick
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.11 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iQEVAwUBSgEyT3cOpHodsOiwAQgdigf9E6kl/9Ye/Q/I9UckjfeB+amQClqb2kQQ
5OljlTeD+mhW8/+FPO2kIvIegj4UyCvqsntC0rCuoiponnax2CC2lBXss8AX5iuD
qgjNLNn3pnB24Le0jA9cXHHl/O2mwjtcX9MV6AmWYNys//9tus+qw+Eo4aj5ateD
ZVCLd74xDdWcSv10rWVkmTUDI/PUHrQ6/6aPdLVv4Z/gEuY+nmV27f+KhxluI5Ow
sexXHuNgaigIN/RyIuwXUdYPpbg1NJuYrTbv3/BJ85L953IIOjIf4XZ2QlrhBAZh
B7Irm2607+5OHd+3NE/cUa6spX80Yr9ikVHiRI3q4xX7eSAGhHhS5Q==
=tlrb
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----