@bernhard Sorry for the delayed answer, was on sabbatical.

@bernhard thank you for explaining, did not mean to offend anybody. Before creating win-gpg-agent I tried to read as much as I could on a history and obviously had to study source a bit. Be it as it may - I decided to have separate wrapper, rather then contributing directly to gpg code base. There is noticable number of use cases on Windows which presently not addressed, some I believe are sitting it the queue already.

Since Windows user naively could expect multiple methods of accessing certificates from different programs (or sometimes from the same program but different supported environments, like Git4Win and git in WSL) to work together transparently, win-gpg-agent covers translation of one accidentally supported method (32 bit putty shared memory) to multiple unsupported ones (named pipe, cygwin, etc). It also takes care of managing gpg-agent.exe lifetime tying it to user login session for convenience. It uses command line parameters to only to overwrite staff critical to its functionality and does not prevent user from having configuration file(s). Optionally it provides pinentry which is integrated with Windows native Crypto Vault and UX rather than using wonderful QT or GTK. As specified in documentation when developers of gpg and WIndows will get their act together and figure out what they want and how they want it - most of functionality would not be needed. I would like to point out that simply claiming superiority and not supporting cygwin (Git4Win) or working Assuan ssh socket or putty shared memory in 64 bits Windows build does not help with user experience a single bit.

I wrote https://github.com/rupor-github/win-gpg-agent to simplify usage on Windows until this issue is resolved - it handles various edge cases on Windows.