From: <craven@gmx.net>
To: Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net>,
	Neil Roberts <neil@linux.intel.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/2] Prompting for the GPG password within Emacs
In-Reply-To: <51D9F4E6.1030504@fifthhorseman.net>
References: <1373195672-9338-1-git-send-email-neil@linux.intel.com>
	<51D9F4E6.1030504@fifthhorseman.net>
User-Agent: Notmuch/0.15.2+182~gd0bd88f (http://notmuchmail.org)
	Emacs/24.3.50.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu)
Date: Mon, 08 Jul 2013 08:45:36 +0200
Message-ID: <87wqp135yn.fsf@nexoid.at>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
Cc: notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Precedence: list

>> I've recently started using notmuch to try and read PGP-encrypted
>> email. However the trouble is I normally access my email remotely via
>> SSH and it's very difficult to get gpg-agent to work in those
>> circumstances. I've therefore made some patches to try and get Emacs
>> to prompt for the password. They are based on the way mml communicates
>> with gpg by having two pipes so that notmuch can notify Emacs that it
>> needs a password and it will reply on the other.

This is what I have tried too :) My setup is as follows:
I run emacs in non-window mode (-nw) on a server machine under tmux (a
terminal multiplexer, like screen). I connect to this via SSH from
different machines (maybe even across multiple SSH logins).

> I strongly encourage you to get the gpg-agent model sorted out for your
> use case, instead of moving in the direction of this patch series.
> Can you describe what you've tried in terms of using gpg-agent?  where
> are your secret keys stored?  are they on your local machine, or on the
> remote machine?

I have the secret keys on the local machine and the remote machine.
gpg-agent runs fine on the remote machine, however I have found no way
to make it consistently prompt for the password on the right SSH
connection (I don't believe there even is a way to achieve this, as
there may be multiple, or I may leave several connections open and move
between machines). The only thing that mostly works is using the remote
gpg-agent to prompt on the terminal, which messes up the display
temporarily.

I'd be really happy about any ideas how to solve this :)

Greetings,

Peter