Newbie can't get --passphrase option to work

[Dan Kegel]

On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 12:31 AM, Peter Lebbing <peter at digitalbrains.com> wrote:
> You should also ask yourself what the purpose of the passphrase is other
> than to make your life difficult....
> You should probably just remove the passphrase from the key. That way
> any decryption or signature will just succeed without jumping through
> hoops to pass the passphrase to GnuPG.

That wasn't my experience.  I used keys with no passphrase,
and *still* had to use loopback (and jump through other hoops) to get
gpg to work unattended.
https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2017-April/058158.html
https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2017-April/058162.html
describe my travails.  It was several days of learning curve.  In fairness,
I needed a solution that worked with all versions of gpg that shipped
with any LTS version of ubuntu, not just the current release, which
made things a bit harder.
- Dan