Re: [gentoo-user] How does ssh know to use "pinentry"?

[Chris Stankevitz <chrisstankevitz@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jul 6, 2014 at 3:25 AM, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Typically they are launched from a bash profile, or an X11 startup
> script.  KDE/Gnome look like they have it in their default scripts.
> Just grep -r gpg-agent /etc and you'll find where it is being loaded
> if you didn't add them to your own startup scripts in /home.

Rich,

Thank you again.  My bash history shows ssh-agent being executed in
the past, but I'm still not sure where gpg-agent came from.

> Using gpg-agent is considered a best practice in general, so I
> wouldn't go getting rid of it unless it is really causing you
> problems.  You haven't mentioned what issue you're actually having
> with it/pinentry/etc.

FYI pinentry frustrates me because:

1. pinentry-gtk and pinentry-qt do not allow me to "paste" my
passphrase.  My passphrase is difficult to type.  I keep my passphrase
in keepass.

2. Supposedly pinentry-curses will let me paste; however,
pinentry-curses doesn't work.
https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg/Common-Problems.html
suggests that my problem is a misconfigured GPG_TTY environment
variable.  At this point though I'm not even interested in using it
anymore.

At the moment pinentry is no longer installed on my system so these
"problems" should be gone.  If/when I understand what is going on,
I'll reinstall them.

FYI I removed pinentry with:

tail /etc/portage/package.use
# 2014-07-05 Avoid pinentry
dev-vcs/git -gpg
mail-client/thunderbird -crypt

tail /etc/portage/package.mask
# 2014-07-05 Avoid password entry program that disallows paste
app-crypt/pinentry

Chris