GnuPG 2.2 on elder Debian & Ubuntu distros

[Phil Pennock]

On 2018-04-17 at 09:25 +0200, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> Am Dienstag 17 April 2018 00:42:13 schrieb Daniel Kahn Gillmor:
> > please don't encourage anyone to edit /usr/lib/systemd/user/* by hand.
> > use the override mechanism as described in the "Example 2. Overriding
> > vendor settings" section in systemd.unit(5), or in the "edit" section of
> > systemctl(1).
> 
> Daniel,
> thanks for the pointer. Is there a way to override this systemd
> setting as user? As least systemd starts something for a users and this user 
> may want to have this changed.

Yes, that's exactly what is described in the documentation which Daniel
linked to.

> And it seems to be a bug in the original Debian package 2.1.18-8~deb9u1 (as 
> '--agent-program FILE' is not honored anymore (which stands in contrast to the 
> documentation in info gnupg).

It's more of a problem of the interaction between systemd socket
activation and GnuPG configuration: two things trying to achieve the
same ends, via different methods.  Handling this better would require
more extensive surgery of GnuPG and I don't think it's reasonable to
expect Daniel as the OS package maintainer, to do such work.  He's got
enough moving pieces to take care of already.

Daniel, I'm sorry, I didn't intend to create support burden for you by
making my own packages publicly available.  I do appreciate the
feedback: I should have remembered that systemd has overlay files etc.

Bernhard: the documentation on the website for my packages now has
correct information for safely overriding these settings, both for all
users and for one particular user.  I've tested both approaches on
Debian Stretch in a VM, they work for me.

-Phil