Interesting to see that discussion :) I was looking at this months ago
when I tried to get it working in Emacs, but I never really found that thread.
> Hm... I don't know much about this stuff, but I'm not sure I
> understand. :-) There exists a program already called pinentry-emacs,
> somebody said? That allows us to enter passwords from Emacs, sort of?
pinentry-emacs can be built from the pintry repo at
git.gnupg.org/pintry.git.
Together with the correct envvars set, this allows us to input passwords
from Emacs, yes :)
However this seems to be seen as a sort of hack, and it's disabled by
default on Arch Linux, FreeBSD and Debian as it seems, so I have had to
build it from source. I guess that alienates a lot of users though :/
I agree it would be nice to have this working out of the box. Figuring
out all the steps took me quite a lot of time and effort actually (I
discovered pinentry-emacs by chance while looking at some changelog
entry in the pinentry repo, I think, and the figured out what it was by
reading the
configure.ac file) and I don't think it qualifies as user
friendly. The reason I decided to look it up in the first place was that
while the gtk popup diolog works fine on an X display, I wanted
something that would work in a terminal as well. And unfortunately it
seems pinentry-curses can't be run through Emacs, well I didn't manage
anyway :)
Joakim