pinentry-gtk2

[fhdhsni]

pinentry-gtk2 sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Sometimes it pops up for the first time but not for the second time (re-enter of passphrase). Same system in i3wm doesn't have this problem. I recorded a video to show what I mean. pinentry-qt doesn't have this problem.

I'm on Arch linux.
GNU Emacs 25.2.1 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.22.10) of 2017-04-22
For exwm I'm using master branch.
And for pinentry-gtk-2 it's
pinentry-gtk2 (pinentry) 1.0.0
Copyright (C) 2016 g10 Code GmbH

[ch11ng]

Emacs has native support for pinentry-tty (might not be this name on Arch) so I'd encourage you to switch to that. Anyway this is a problem and I'll try to fix it.

[tumashu]

If you open a new emacs session, pinentry-gtk2 seem to work.

[Stebalien]

On arch, there's pinentry-emacs (although I believe you need to enable pinentry in emacs first with (pinentry-start t)).

[ch11ng]

Just tried to reproduce the problem but failed. I also tried hiding the mode line of floating X windows but it didn't make any difference. Do you have issue with other floating X window?

[fhdhsni]

@ch11ng No. I haven't encounter any problem other than that.

[ch11ng]

Just an update: I didn't reproduced the problem with the same version of pinentry-gtk2 and Emacs 25.2.1 built according to the instructions from Arch's PKGBUILD.

Could you try a minimal configuration (with other features and optional EXWM modules disabled)?

[tumashu]

My machine have the same problem, pinentry-gtk2 can input password, but if I open a new emacs, it works

[ghost]

I was able to route around this issue by adding pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-emacs to $HOME/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf

[tumashu]

https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/32881/enabling-minibuffer-pinentry-with-emacs-25-and-gnupg-2-1-on-ubuntu-xenial

[arunisaac]

Unlike fhdhsni, pinentry-gtk-2 never works for me -- not even once or twice...

I have made a little progress debugging it. Perhaps, someone here can say more.

On executing

echo GETPIN | /path/to/pinentry-gtk-2

I get the following error message:

OK Pleased to meet you

** (pinentry-gtk-2:23241): CRITICAL **: could not grab keyboard: not viewable (3)

** (pinentry-gtk-2:23241): WARNING **: it took 4097 tries to grab the keyboard

** (pinentry-gtk-2:23241): CRITICAL **: could not grab pointer: not viewable (3)

** (pinentry-gtk-2:23241): WARNING **: it took 4097 tries to grab the pointer
ERR 83886179 Operation cancelled <Pinentry>

[ch11ng]

@arunisaac pinentry-gtk-2 also complains on my machine that it has to retry several times before grabbing the keyboard. This is one possible cause for the original issue. Does the problem persist when calling pinentry-gtk-2 with -g (which disables the grabbing behavior)?

[arunisaac]

Indeed, it works now with -g flag. I also tested with no-grab added to my ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf. It works with that too. :-)

However, man gpg-agent warns that no-grab "should in general not be used to avoid X-sniffing attacks". So, it remains important to fix the underlying issue in exwm.

[ch11ng]

I'm on Debian and Debian has patched pinentry in response to the following bug reports:

• https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=850708
• https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=851707

This explains why I have never reproduced the issue. @fhdhsni @arunisaac you probably get fast machines so pinentry-gtk-2 easily fails. I believe this is not a bug of EXWM. You need to push your distro or upstream to fix the problem.

[fhdhsni]

@ch11ng Thank you for all you've done and the time you put on this awesome project. ❤️

[arunisaac]

@ch11ng Sure, I'll do that. Thank you!