sending interactive passwords

[Adam M.]

Adam M. wrote:
> It seems to me that it is impossible to send multiple passwords to GPG
> without direct user interaction on a TTY...

It's even worse with decryption, because I don't know beforehand which 
key's password to ask for, or whether a key will be used at all (the 
data might have been symmetrically encrypted).

I suppose the thing to do is run GPG first, let it fail, try to figure 
out which password to ask for, and then run it again. But then I can't 
support arbitrary data streams (for instance network streams) because 
they can't necessarily be read, rewound, and read again. I could write 
them to a temp file on disk, but I prefer not to leave bits on the hard 
drive unnecessarily.

I think it would really complete the GPG interface to have interactive 
password querying. It already issues NEED_PASSPHRASE* messages on the 
status-fd stream, so we just need a way to answer those prompts...

Am I missing some obvious downside? Should I code this and send a patch? 
Is this something that the developers don't want in GPG?

Thanks,
-- Adam