[PATCH] gpg-agent: Enable socket activation

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On 11/20/2014 01:34 PM, Werner Koch wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Nov 2014 18:14, dkg at fifthhorseman.net said:
> 
>> I would like to see the gpg-agent be able to start based on a passed-in
>> file descriptor and stay foregrounded.
> 
> We had several ways to start gpg-agent in the past and am glad that most
> of this mess could been removed.  This makes maintenance and evaluating
> bug reports much easier.

Shea's proposal would not affect the daemon-starting logic that
currently exists in other parts of the GnuPG suite.  It just provides a
way that a supervised agent could be initialized (and therefore could be
cleanly torn down).

If any supervising process doesn't use this feature, then everything
behaves as normal.  If a supervising process does use this feature, then
the daemon is already in place, and it works anyway (but the clients
never end up spawning the daemon).

I don't want to get into a tangential argument about what is "the Unix
way", but in many ways the tradition of composable tools that do "one
thing well" suggests that the triplet of <process supervision daemon,
socket-activated service, and simple client> is in some ways more
"unix-like" than having every potential client need to know how to spawn
every potential daemon that it might use.

Being able to use gpg-agent as part of such a composable environment
would be a very nice option to have.

Regards,

	--dkg

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