GnuPG 2.0 vs. 1.4 locale; gpgme_set_locale

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Sat, 2006-11-25 at 17:46 +0100, Albrecht Dreß wrote:
> I have two related questions regarding the locale treatment in gnupg and  
> gpgme.
> 
> After upgrading from gnupg 1.4 to 2.0 I noticed that the behaviour of  
> passing strings to pinentry changed if I e.g. just type "gpg --sign" on  
> the terminal.  The following table lists the locale settings, the encoding  
> of the strings printed on the terminal and the encoding of the strings  
> passed to pinentry:
> 
> Application | terminal locale  | terminal output  | pinentry strings
> ------------+------------------+------------------+-----------------
> gnupg 1.4   | de_DE.ISO-8859-1 | de_DE.ISO-8859-1 | *de_DE.UTF-8*
> gnupg 1.4   | de_DE.UTF-8      | de_DE.UTF-8      | de_DE.UTF-8
> gnupg 2.0   | de_DE.ISO-8859-1 | de_DE.ISO-8859-1 | *de_DE.ISO-8859-1*
> gnupg 2.0   | de_DE.UTF-8      | de_DE.UTF-8      | de_DE.UTF-8
> 
> Both versions use the agent and the Gtk+-2.0 pinentry version.  As my  
> environment is still set to latin1, pinentry gets confused if it gets a  
> string containing /mixed/ character sets where the message is in latin1  
> ("Sie benötigen eine Passphrase...), but the description of my key  
> ("Albrecht Dreß") is in utf-8.  Launching the agent with LC_ALL set to  
> de_DE.UTF-8 makes things even worse as it calls pinentry with this  
> setting, and then pinentry has no clue how it should call iconv to convert  
> the latin1 string properly.
> 
> Shouldn't the conversation between gnupg and the agent always be in utf-8?

Yes, I think so.  That it isn't above for GnuPG 2.0 seems to be a bug.
Can you file a report at bugs.g10code.com?

> If not, gnupg /must/ ensure that the strings contain characters from only  
> /one/ encoding.  However, IMHO exclusively using utf-8 is the better  
> solution as key descriptions may contain characters from any codeset.
> 
> The second question is how gpgme treats gpgme_set_locale() when I call the  
> gnupg backend.  I mainly use gpg through the Gnome MUA balsa, which talks  
> to gnupg through gpgme.  In balsa, I tried to explicitly set a gpgme utf-8  
> locale, but apparently this setting isn't fed through to gpg, i.e. it  
> still runs with my "normal" (Latin-1) environment.  A quick glance over  
> the source shows that (in posix-io.c) a execv() call is used instead of  
> execve().  How are the locales set in gpgme are supposed to work?

The locale setting is currently only honored for gpgsm, see
engine-gpgsm.c:gpgsm_new().  The main idea behind gpgme_set_locale is to
set GPGME to the same locale as the application (which GPGME can't do
for you because of thread safety issues).

I don't mind supporting locale setting for GnuPG.  Do you want to work
out a patch?  Otherwise it will probably be done when we run GnuPG in
server mode as well.

Thanks,
Marcus