NEED_PASSPHRASE and gpg-agent

[Werner Koch]

On Tue, 22 Apr 2003 08:11:13 -0700, Justin Karneges said:

> It seems that even if gpg-agent is present, gpg will still send the 
> NEED_PASSPHRASE status.  Is this considered a bug?  What happens is my 

This is of course a feature ;-)

It would be too hard to change this because gpg falls back to the
regular passphrase asking if there is a problem with the agent.
Changing this now might break too many applications and thus we keep
it as it is in the 1.2.x series.

For your application, I would shortcut the handling of NEED_PASSPHRASE
if $GPG_AGENT_INFO is set and --use-agent is used.

A future gpg version will fully support the agent (i.e. all secret key
operations are done by the agent) and the passphrase status message
will not anymore emitted.  As of now, gpg-agent passes the request for
a passphrase more or less straight through to the pinentry.  The only
advantage is that gpg-agent is able to cache the passphrase.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner


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