Hi there, I plan to refactor the code used for GnuPG in the Message mode of Emacs (Gnus) and started a discussion on the Gnus devel mailing list ding. An open issue is passphrase caching within Emacs, which might be removed in the future. So if you encrypt e-mail and cache passphrases inside Emacs (instead of gpg-agent), please let me know why. Also, do you think that it is necessary to have four different variables to enable caching and another four to control caching duration? (mml-secure-cache-passphrase, mml1991-cache-passphrase, mml2015-cache-passphrase, mml-smime-cache-passphrase; mml-secure-passphrase-cache-expiry, mml1991-passphrase-cache-expiry, mml2015-passphrase-cache-expiry, mml-smime-passphrase-cache-expiry)
As gpg-agent is the daemon to manage secret keys, I recommend to use that as trusted place to cache passphrases, which works with GnuPG 1.x. as well as 2.x. Note that GnuPG 2.x is where the development happens, and according to GnuPG’s README, “2.0 is the current stable version for general use”, while “1.4 is the old standalone version which is most suitable for older or embedded platforms.” If I’m not mistaken (please let me know if I’m wrong), with GnuPG 2.x (and gpgsm) passphrases cannot be cached within Emacs as gpg-agent is started automatically and tries to invoke a pinentry program. So, caching-related variables only apply to GnuPG 1.x and S/MIME with openssl (I suggest not to advertise the latter any longer and will send a separate e-mail to discuss that), which should be documented if we plan to keep that functionality. What’s your opinion? Best wishes Jens P.S. Encryption is self-defense. Learn more: https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/ _______________________________________________ info-gnus-english mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnus-english
