Bug#351715: pinentry doesn't work properly on dumb terminals

[Peter Eisentraut]

This has been reported to the Debian bug tracking system.  Comments?

Am Montag, 6. Februar 2006 23:02 schrieb Miles Bader:
> Package: pinentry
> Version: 0.7.2-3
> Severity: normal
>
> I often want to use gpg, and thus pinentry, in an Emacs shell buffer or
> the like where a "graphical" curses-based dialog like pinentry-curses
> doesn't work; in some cases I do this when logged in remotely via ssh,
> so pinentry-gtk doesn't work either.
>
> In such a case, pinentry-curses either displays gibberish (if TERM is
> set, but not to something useful, e.g. to "emacs"), or simply fails (if
> TERM is not set).
>
> Pinentry or pinentry-curses should really have a fallback mode that
> simply turns off echoing and reads from the tty, just like gpg does
> when gpg-agent isn't used.
>
> [To tell the truth, I dislike the heavyweight and intrusive
> pinentry-curses dialog -- it obscures the terminal output which usually
> tells me exactly why gpg is being run! -- and I'd really like to be able
> to specify something like "--no-curses" and have it immediately fallback
> to dumb-terminal mode when no gtk dialog is possible.]