--pinentry-mode causes curses

[Jake]

I am using alpine for a mail reader, and i recently integrated GPG support 
so I can read and send encrypted mail.  I am using gpg (GnuPG) 2.0.21

I am also running screen, and alpine is running in one of the windows of 
screen.

I believe it is a known issue that pinentry doesn't work with screen. 
Perhaps there is a way to fix that but I have been cacheing with 
gpg-preset-passphrase and that has been working.  However, when the 
cache timeout happens, if I try to send an email gpg2 gets called and 
wants my passphrase.  It calls pinentry.  That creates problems for me.

So I tried to use the parameter --pinentry-mode=cancel which would 
hopefully cause gpg2 to simply fail if my passphrase isn't cached, 
allowing me to gpg-preset-passphrase in another window and try again. 
However, it doesn't seem to be a recognized option at all.

Note this is not the gnupg i compiled on my laptop, this is regular 
admin-installed gpg on a freeBSD system.

I apologize if this is a RTFM type problem, or a known issue that simply 
is not a priority at this time.  I just did a grep for pinentry-mode in 
the source code and found it only in the documentation.

My best guess is that pinentry-mode is for unreleased version 2.1 and I 
should focus on other solutions to my unique problem.

thank you,
-jake

[jake at pe2950 ~/bin]$ gpg --pinentry mode cancel
gpg: Invalid option "--pinentry"
[jake at pe2950 ~/bin]$ gpg2 --pinentry-mode=cancel
gpg: invalid option "--pinentry-mode=cancel"
[jake at pe2950 ~/bin]$ gpg2 --pinentry-mode=loopback FILE.gpg
gpg: invalid option "--pinentry-mode=loopback"
[jake at pe2950 ~/bin]$ gpg2 --version
gpg (GnuPG) 2.0.21
libgcrypt 1.5.2
Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later 
<http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Home: ~/.gnupg
Supported algorithms:
Pubkey: RSA, ELG, DSA
Cipher: IDEA, 3DES, CAST5, BLOWFISH, AES, AES192, AES256, TWOFISH,
         CAMELLIA128, CAMELLIA192, CAMELLIA256
Hash: MD5, SHA1, RIPEMD160, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512, SHA224
Compression: Uncompressed, ZIP, ZLIB, BZIP2