bug#22711: 25.0.91; prompt for gpg password is displayed in a dialog box rather than in the minibuffer

[N. Jackson]

At 17:56 -0500 on Tuesday 2016-02-16, Glenn Morris wrote:

> See http://debbugs.gnu.org/20982 

Thanks Glenn,

I now vaguely remember reading that at the time, but lacked the
background to follow the discussion. Now I have a bit more context, but
it's still a bit opaque.

===

I tried following the instructions in
http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=20982#20.

I have pinentry version "pinentry-gtk2 (pinentry) 0.9.6" and gpg2 version
"gpg (GnuPG) 2.1.9".

I put the line

    allow-emacs-pinentry

in ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf (which file did not previously exist).

Then:

0. emacs -Q &

1. M-x pinentry-start

3. C-x C-f myfile.gpg

But I still got the same graphical dialog box for the password prompt.

===

In NEWS it says:

    ** pinentry.el allows GnuPG passphrase to be prompted through the
    minibuffer instead of a graphical dialog, depending on whether the gpg
    command is called from Emacs (i.e., INSIDE_EMACS environment variable
    is set).  This feature requires newer versions of GnuPG (2.1.5 or
    later) and Pinentry (0.9.5 or later).

This seems to be what I want, but if I am reading it correctly, it does
not work.

It seems to say that if the INSIDE_EMACS environment variable is set,
the gpg password prompt will be displayed in the minibuffer.

I even tried starting Emacs with

    export INSIDE_EMACS=t; emacs &

so INSIDE_EMACS is unequivocally defined, but it doesn't help. Even if I do

    M-x pinentry-start

before opening a .gpg file, I'm still being prompted with a graphical
dialog box.

===

There does not seem to be any user documentation for pinentry.el. (There
is no entry in the Emacs manual for "pinentry" and while there is a
pinentry info manual, it is for the 'real' (command line) pinentry, not
for pinentry.el.)