Avoid pinentry-gtk-2 when using console!

[Roger]

On Sat, 2009-05-30 at 23:16 -0400, Steven W. Orr wrote:

> Whatever program you're using that is invoking gpg has the DISPLAY 
> variable set. What you can do is to create a shell wrapper that shuts 
> DISPLAY off. e.g., I'm running alpine, so I *could* create an alpine 
> command a la
> 
> #! /bin/bash
> unset DISPLAY
> /usr/bin/alpine "$@"
> exit
> 
> The only caveat is that whatever program you use will suffer the loss of 
> access to your entire DISPLAY, not just pinentry

I'm using rxvt-unicode and GNU Screen combo.

As I stated, "I'm invoking gpg from the command line shell."

Interesting hack, but this is going to kill my command line experience
when I type "gvim"!

Notice, vim & gvim have an option to call either or, and if X isn't
present, falls back to vi/vim?

This is probably what pinentry should do, instead of depending on X (gtk
or qt3) explicitly.


---snip---

if {environmental variable is set to console/gtk/qt3}
  use the specified pinentry flavor

else use pinentry-console

else use pinentry-gtk

fi

---snip---


A good place for this environmental variable is within
$HOME/.gnupg/options.


This way, there's a fallback to the fallback method as there is no
telling where a user or what X application is going to invoke gpg.
Well, obviously there is, but it hinders those working in a shell doing
simple task with gpg!

I'm guessing, the current solution is to assume the user is a dumb X
user. ;-)

(I use both, command line for gpg, as well as Evolution for email which
is set to only call pinentry-gtk-2.)


From searching on the web, there's quite a few others griping about this
same issue.


-- 
Roger
http://rogerx.freeshell.org
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