If you add it to gpg.conf the Pinentry won't be used and there are fir sure
cases where things won't work. In an unattended use I can't see a problem right
now.

We can't change the behaviour of --passpharse-fd; it is widely used and:

  if ( !opt.batch && opt.pinentry_mode != PINENTRY_MODE_LOOPBACK)
    { /* Not used but we have to do a dummy read, so that it won't end
         up at the begin of the message if the quite usual trick to
         prepend the passphtrase to the message is used. */

think would break or - worse - may insert the passphrase into the message.

The passphrase is still used for symmetric only encryption in batch mode.

Roger that, thanks - I've tested it on a VM with my keys and things seem "like
they used to be" for scripting an automated passphrase entry. I specified them
in my ~/.gnupg/pgp.conf and ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf since editing many
individual softwares is not possible at this time, it needs to be backwards
compatible.

What side affects (breaking things?) does having these options permanently
enabled in configs are there? Having the allow in gpg-agent.conf is harmless,
but what about the client side gpg.conf?

If client gpg '--passphrase-fd 0' is useless without '--pinentry-mode loopback',
why not make this an automatic added option (internally) if '--passphrase-fd 0'
is specified? Of what use with gnupg-2.1.x is '--passphrase-fd 0' without
'--pinentry-mode loopback'?

I double-checked the official docs, there's no mention of needing these new
loopback settings in the section for --passphrase-fd 0:

https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg/GPG-Esoteric-Options.html#GPG-Esoteric-Options

"If you use 0 for n, the passphrase will be read from STDIN." (but as we know
here, it's not unless the new loopback options are added)

Like gpgsm has done from its very beginnong, gpg now also does not pknow
anything about the secret keys. This is all delagted to gpg-agent. This means
that telling gpg a passphrase is useless.

But wait. There is a workaround: gpg has the new option

   --pinentry-mode mode
          Set the pinentry mode to mode.  Allowed values for mode are:

          default
                 Use the default of the agent, which is ask.

          ask    Force the use of the Pinentry.

          cancel Emulate use of Pinentry's cancel button.

          error  Return a Pinentry error (``No Pinentry'').

          loopback

                 Redirect Pinentry queries to the caller.  Note that
                 in contrast to Pinentry the user is not prompted
                 again if he enters a bad pass- word.

Thus by using

  gpg --pinentry-mode=loopback

you can do basically the same as with 1.4. It is well tested and
slighly different than in 1.4. Uou also need to configure gpg-agent
with

  --allow-loopback-pinentry

       Allow clients to use the loopback pinentry features; see the
       option pinentry-mode for details.

A few Arch users are reporting the same regression/breakage, thread here:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1479136

With pinentry 0.9 this works in pinentry-gtk under GNU/Linux.

With pinentry 0.8.4 This works in pinentry-qt4 under Windows.

Gpg4win includes a version with paste support since 2.1.0 (I think)

Feel free to send a patch ;-). You may want to publish this feature request on
some mailing list and ask for help.

pinentry-qt should have only been the default if you install a gpg4win version
that includes qt.

Could you execute pinetry-qt directly and enter "getpin" in the command line
window that opens?
What happens then?

Thanks for the explanations.

Further analysis showed that the second call to AllowSetForeground window was
blocked by the ForegroundWindowLockTimeout. If you set this timeout to zero
everything worked as expected.

There is a discussion on this under:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/09fa16ba-c6ef-410d-bec2-a99a9b9a98d9/issue-with-foregroundlocktimeout-setforegroundwindow

Which suggests a solution of setting the foregroundlocktimeout to zero before
attempting to set the foreground window. I've found this solution not applicable
for our case as we run into the lock on "AllowSetForegroundWindow" and not when
actually setting the foreground Window.

Another workaround is to call AttachThreadInput on the current foreground thread
call SetForegroundWindow and then detach again. There might be problems with
this approach so it is just used as fallback. But it should resolve this problem
for now.

What I described is done for all pinentries.

Ok, thanks I'll check what happens if

5. The agent thinks that the passphrase entered is too weak
6. The agent starts another pinentry
7. The agent sends "getinfo pid" to the pinentry (this i can see)
8. ?

1. The agent starts pinentry.
2. The agent sends "getinfo pid" to the pinentry"
3. The agents sends an "INQUIRE PINENTRY_LAUNCHED <pid>" to the caller.

4a. If the caller is gpg, gpg calls AllowSetForegroundWindow for the received
pid; gpg has been started via gpgme and gpgme has called ASFW for gpg.
4b. If the caller is gpgsm, it proxies the PINENTRY_LAUNCHED to gpgme which then
calls ASFG for the pid.

The different methods are required because gpg is a one-off process while gpgsm
may be used several times.

Yes Kleopatra uses gpgme for key generation. Still I don't see how gpgme figures
into this sorry. Should gpgme start gpg-agent and ensure that it has the
setforeground window access right?

1. The gpg-agent asks for a passphrase with pinentry -> set foreground window is

allowed.

2. If that passphrase is weak it launches a new pinentry with a confirm dialog

-> set foreground window is not allowed.

And the agent does not have the right to call allowsetforegroundwindow. In the
first case I think this might be because another component gets the PID of the
pinentry and calls allowsetforeground window (have to do further debugging to
check this)

In the second case afaik only gpg-agent is involved and no one sets
allowsetforeground window on the pid of the second pinentry.

BTW, gpgme 1.5.1 has a spawn interface which is better than to code your own in Qt.

It goes all the way back to GPGME via the assuan interface. grep for
_gpgme_allow_set_foreground_window. For GPG the assuan interface is not used.
We do it by passing our internal IOSPAWN_FLAG_ALLOW_SET_FG flag to the
gpgme-w32spawn.c helper which then uses this to call set foreground API.

Does Kleopatra always use gpgme?

Sorry for the delay, the passphrase is 512 characters long (now I should change
it after publishing that here ;-)) and just ascii characters.

With GnuPG 1.x, Enigmail takes care of presenting the passphrase dialog.
With GnuPG 2.x GnuPG does it of its own. For that it spawns a small tool
called pinentry which asks for the passphrase. We actually have several
versions of that pinentry. The one you are using is based on Qt (a toolkit) and
has a limit of 256 bytes for the passphrase. The limit may actually be lower if
you are using non-ascii characters, but I can't see how that value is not
sufficient.

How long is your passphrase and does it contain many non-ascii characters (e.g.
Umlauts)?

Hello, Thank you for your reply.

I used the gpg4win-2.2.1.exe binary which I downloaded from gpg4win.org

The popup I mentioned is the screen that asks me for my password when I try to
open an encrypted mail in my mailbox via thunderbird/enigmail. See the
screenshot. In the newer gpg version this popup is replaced by a prompt screen
that says pinentry and will allow only for shorter passwords.

I understand that my password is exceptional long, as I still was (and maybe
still am) a beginner on the encrypted mail part. But backwards compatibility
seems pretty important in the case of encrypted mails and passwords to decrypt them.

What do you mean by "openpgp popup"?

Which installation options did you used whethn installing gpg4win? Depending on
the version you get a different pinentry version - we have a qt based one, a GTK
based base, and a very simple native windows pinentry.

For the record. This is now optional in pinentry 0.8.4 you can pass
--enable-pinentry-qt4-clipboard to configure to enable clipboard and paste support.

pkg-config variant.

There is also ncurses-config option...

D172: 374_pinentry-0.8.2-ncurses-pkg-config.patch

try starting pinentry with these options (ASSUAN commands) where $TTY and $LANG
are correctly set in current environment

OPTION ttyname=$TTY
OPTION lc-ctype=$LANG

D160: 360_pinentry-gtk2.patch

Please re-open if you still see this problem.

Meanwhile even 2.0.18 is out. Closing it.

See also T1370

Duplicate of T1370

This is on purpose for the GTK version. The authors of the Qt version obviously
think that this is not important.

strange thing is that this works with pinentry-qt

Screenshot shows the small textfield.

(The height of the passphrase textfield is too small)

tested with gnupg 2.0.18 and pinentry 0.8.0 pinentry-qt4 starts in background
tested with gnupg 2.0.18 and pinentry 0.8.1: pinentry-qt4 starts in foreground
as excepted.

These are the versions in Debian squeeze.
The same happens with gnupg 2.0.17 and pinentry 0.8.0, we have not tested 0.8.1 yet.

gnupg 2.0.14 ? You should uodate this before reporting a bug.
pinentry 0.8.1 was released 10 months ago - please test with that one first.

Confirmed with different user accounts and window managers (KDE, stumpwm, ...).
The qt3 version works without problems.