debugging systemd user services for gpg-agent and dirmngr [was: Re: gpg hangs when asking for passphrase]

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Wed 2017-05-10 22:17:28 -0400, Joey Morris wrote:
> I've been using my .xession setup for a number of years, and actually when this
> issue came up it was the first I'd heard of systemd user services. (I was aware
> of the system-level systemd, just not the user-specific part.) I'll spend some
> time getting up to speed on it.

i wasn't trying to suggest that you should transition ~/.xsession
entirely to systemd user services.  I was aiming to suggest that you
could move most of whatever's in your ~/.xsession to
~/.config/openbox/autostart and see whether that changes anything.  Feel
free to ignore creation of any new systemd user services in the meantime
:)


> Running just `journalctl --user-unit gpg-agent`, I get:

as you guessed, this was the command i meant to have you run.  thanks!

>     No journal files were found.
>     Failed to get journal fields: Cannot assign requested address

my guess is that you have no /var/log/journal directory, so everything
stored by the journal will be in the ephemeral /run/log/journal.
/run/log/journal (even the per-user stuff) isn't readable by non-root
users (this is an outstanding request for enhancement for systemd:
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2744)

That said, you can still examine the stuff in /run/log/journal as root
with:

    journalctl _SYSTEMD_USER_UNIT=gpg-agent.service _UID=1000

(assuming that your non-privileged user ID is 1000).

> I have systemd version 222-1 installed, which appears to be wildly out of date.
> The first thing I'll try when I get back to this is to upgrade systemd.

yes, please!

thanks for checking up on this,

       --dkg
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