Key creation problem with 2.1.16

[Carola Grunwald]

Hello Daniel,

on Wed, 07 Dec 2016 23:30:20 -0500, you wrote:

>On Wed 2016-12-07 22:27:07 -0500, Carola Grunwald wrote:
>> In fact I experience at least two different kinds of failure. Both are
>> sporadic, not systematic errors. As I tried to provide a similar
>> starting situation for each of these command calls I'm surprised at the
>> varying outcome.
>
>Thanks for the details, Carola.  This all sounds really frustrating, but
>i'm afraid i'm not in a good position to debug it, given that it seems
>to involve Windows.  I'm not able to reproduce a 50/50 error on the
>linux systems i usually test and develop on :/
>
>hopefully someone with more windows experience can help you out more.

Well, let's hope so.

>
>sorry to not be more help,

Thanks a lot Daniel, I appreciate your dedication.

P.S.: Maybe I finally got it!

For unattended key creation you're allowed to add the passphrase to the
parameter file defined with the --gen-key command. That's what the
manual https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg.pdf tells us at
page 84 and what works with v1.4.

| Passphrase: string
|   If you want to specify a passphrase for the secret key, enter it here.
|   Default is to use the Pinentry dialog to ask for a passphrase.

But with v2.1 it looks as if you nevertheless have to add a --passphrase
parameter. Otherwise the command aborts with an error 2. It looks as if
the passphrase in the file is used only for key creation but not for key
data retrieval, which happens afterwards. That's where it complains
about the missing passphrase input.

I don't know why the gen-key command still succeeds every now and then
even with a missing --passphrase parameter. Either a miracle, or that
happens when the passphrase is in the cache, which I love so much for
the confusion I expect it can cause.

Kind regards

Caro