rationale of calling setsid() in gpg-agent?

[Werner Koch]

On Fri, 17 May 2002 18:32:22 +0200, Matthias Welwarsky said:

> I'm wondering why the startup code in gpg-agent.c calls setsid() to enter a 
> new session. How is the gpg-agent supposed to be started? I thought was like 
> with the ssh-agent that's started once for each user session. As such, it 

No it should be used once per user and thus it does not make sense to
kill it at logout.  Well I know that it is not easy to locate the
right socket from another session but there are ways to do it and
eventaully we will allow setting the name of the socket.

gpg-agent has a feature to use the correct pinentry (curses or gtk)
on a per connection base.  Yes, there the support is currently
somewhat limited but everything is in place to make it fully work.

> I usually start the gpg-agent from my Xsession script with eval 'gpg-agent', 

> by logging out. So I have effectively a couple of gpg-agents running

Eventually we will have an option to check for this.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner