Where can I find info on "use-agent"

[Werner Koch]

On Tue, 22 Oct 2002 09:09:08 -0600, Rustad, Aaron said:

> Can anyone tell me where I might find information about using the
> "use-agent" flag? I have looked in the man file, Howto, Handbook, mailing
> lists....but no luck.

Just ask ;-)

There used to be an old agent in the abandoned gnupg 1.1.1 release
which is still supported by gpg. 

However the newer one is the one developed for the Ägypten project
available with the newpg package (http://www.gnupg.org/aegypten/).
Currently it works only on GNU/Linux Systems; the agent itself might
work on other systems too but I never tried[1].

To build newpg you need the libgcrypt and libksba libraries, although
they are not really used when using gpg-agent along with GnuPG.  It
might be useful if someone creates a new package with just the bare
gpg-agent stripped down to the code required for the use by gpg and
maybe combine that with the GTK+/ncurses pinentry. Another choice
would be a pinentry which directly acts as the gpg-agent.  If someone
wants to take such a job just tell me or the list.

Work is currently underway to merge newpg (and thus the gpg-agent)
with GnuPG.  A GNUPG-1-9-BRANCH has therefore been created in the CVS
which eventually will lead to a GnuPG 2.0 release.  But don't expect
that to happen soon.  GnuPG 2.0 will undergo heavy internal changes
and thus a stable version 1.4 will be released much earlier than
anything from that second development branch.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner



[1] The reason is that we use some glibc specific features like
fopencookie in some parts of newpg and the stub we use for other
systems is really only a stub.