Q: howto check if gpg is doing a update-trustdb?

[David Shaw]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 11:05:05AM +0100, Albrecht Dreß wrote:
> Is there a way to check if gpg is currently performing an update of the  
> trust database, either triggered automatically or by explicitly running it  
> with --update-trustdb? The preferred way for me would of course be asking  
> through gpgme, but a "direct access" would be also ok.
> 
> The background of this question: A user of the mua balsa for which I  
> hacked gpg(me) support complained that when checking a message with  
> signature for which the key is not yet in the key ring, gpg tries to load  
> the key and updates the database, which takes up to 15 minutes for him.  
> During this time gpg is unavailable, so balsa simply stalls. Therefore, I  
> would like to check if gpg is available before launching this operation.  

You can look for a "trustdb.gpg.lock" file in whatever directory the
trustdb.gpg file is.

That said, though, 15 minutes is really long.  How many keys does the
user have?  Did they run --rebuild-keydb-caches?

David