launching GnuPG daemons from the system session manager [was: Re: Environment variables for UPDATESTARTUPTTY of gpg-agent]

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Tue 2016-07-12 10:53:20 +0200, Werner Koch wrote:
> You mean 2.0?  Since 2.1 auto starting the agent is the default and I
> don't see why some other software should take part in it.  GnUPG would
> not anymore be self-contained.  Anyway.

The rationale for having systemd manage the daemon startup on systems
that are supported by systemd is twofold:

 * systemd can start up a daemon at login time; if you use gpg-agent for
   ssh before you ever use gpg, gpg-agent will not be automatically
   launched for you by any GnuPG tool if you are only manually invoking
   ssh.

 * systemd can also safely shut down the daemons when the user finally
   logs out.  GnuPG has no explicit support for cleanup/destruction of
   running daemons, since it doesn't know when the user is logging out.

on non-systemd operating systems, the same argument probably applies to
whatever integrated session management they offer.

           --dkg