epa and gnupg-agent

[Richard Riley]

I recently converted to using an .authinfo.gog as opposed to using a
.authinfo.

Symmetric encryption and caching worked fine. I set
epa-file-cache-passphrase-for-symmetric-encryption to t and all was
well.

The problem was moving to key encryption. This is on a Debian btw.

With seahorse - caching worked fine. seahorse and various other
solutions seem a little "non standard" to me - and a quick google about
gpg-agent and Linux shows hosts of different approaches.

I decided to try using gpg-agent but invoking it from "keychain" which
does not require X to start a caching agent as seahorse did (an S file
in /etc/X11/Xsession.d/). I finally settled on 

,----
| keychain &&. /home/rgr/.keychain/development.rgr.net-sh-gpg
`----

in my .bash_env which is sourced from .bash_profile etc.

logging in now I get a gpg-agent and logging out and back in I get the
same agent. Works great.

(the -gpg file above contains something like
"GPG_AGENT_INFO=/tmp/gpg-Q9UHBl/S.gpg-agent:1967:1; export
GPG_AGENT_INFO;"
which is generated by keychain).

However after a timeout, if I access gnus from emacs then epa does not
manage to talk to the same agent. Instead it prompts me for the password
for each and every .authinfo.gpg entities it accesses.

A bug perhaps? I would expect it to launch pinentry-x11 and recache.

A "ps alx | grep -i gpg" shows gpg-agent is still working.

Here is my .gpg-agent.conf

,----
| pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-x11
| no-grab
| default-cache-ttl 1800
`----

Anyone else using a similar "keychain" approach to gpg-agent and if so
does gnus/epa prompt you for a password after the cache timeout?