gpg-agent env-vars

[Thomas Zander]

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I have the problem that an email client wants to access the gpg-agent and 
therefor should have some environment variables.  Problem is that many 
(KDE among others) env-scripts don't make this easy.

Besides hard-to-debug packaging issues the current memory-only way of 
storing the gpg-agent connection information makes it impossible to 
provide the user with a setup wizard or other client to make using the 
agent easier.

I was thinking that if ssh-agent would write a standardised file with the 
env-variables it now prints on stdout; the various clients could read 
that file.
Standardisation was proposed to be done from the mail-client; but I don't 
like that.  I would get ugly if multiple clients try to do it and do it 
differently. Not to mention what distros might think of making it even 
harder to package things.

So; what about changing gpg-agent to make it effectively does this;
    (umask 077 && gpg-agent > ~/.gpg-agent)
Small change making a lot of dependencies a lot easier since now starting 
kmail or mutt can read that file and access the agent without problems.
Naturally this means clients can also start the agent mid-session so a 
re-login is not needed anymore.

I'd like to hear opinions.  Are there more people who expressed a need to 
solve this?  Is this a good solution?
etc.

ps. please cc answers as I am not subscribed.
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Thomas Zander
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