Subject: Re: bug#29906: 27.0.50; Emacs prompts for passwords in GUI dialog instead of minibuffer

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 Dec 2017 20:02:33 +0200

> From: [email-masked] (N. Jackson)
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Date: Sat, 30 Dec 2017 10:54:31 -0500
> 
> At 10:19 +0200 on Saturday 2017-12-30, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >
> > Does this NEWS.26 entry help?
> >
> >   ** The pinentry.el library has been removed.
> >   That package (and the corresponding change in GnuPG and pinentry)
> >   was intended to provide a way to input passphrase through Emacs with
> >   GnuPG 2.0.  However, the change to support that was only implemented
> >   in GnuPG >= 2.1 and didn't get backported to GnuPG 2.0.  And with
> >   GnuPG 2.1 and later, pinentry.el is not needed at all.  So the
> >   library was useless, and we removed it.  GnuPG 2.0 is no longer
> >   supported by the upstream project.
> >
> >   To adapt to the change, you may need to set 'epa-pinentry-mode' to the
> >   symbol 'loopback'.
> 
> Yes, that does help, thank you. I should have checked the news.
> 
> It doesn't help me decide what to do though. Do you know if using
> the prompt in the minibuffer (using `loopback') is thought to be
> less secure than using the external pinentry program?

I don't know enough about this to tell.  Daiki, any inputs?

> > What version of GnuPG do you have on that system?
> 
> Here `gpg' is GnuPG 1.4.22 and `gpg2' is GnuPG 2.2.3.