Can you therefore please clarify the purpose of the Libgcrypt LTS branch? My impression was that pairing the Libgcrypt LTS with GnuPG LTS was appropriate, based on both GnuPG and Libgcrypt LTS appearing on your downloads page at approximately the same time (from memory). Specifically, is there any issue using latest Libgcrypt 1.10.x with GnuPG LTS? Thank you.

Renamed bug due it being incorrect to assume this was a bug with libgpg-error. Turns out that a simple patch to g10/Makefile.am in GnuPG 2.2.40 LTS source fixes the linking error. Patch that fixed build for me is attached, which basically puts -lws2_32 in the correct location for builds with the new libgpg-error 1.46 version.

The patch for T5834 (https://dev.gnupg.org/rMad3aabdd8a64156c7e3a75d695ae1ab2c4bec841) was already applied to the build of GPGME 1.17.0 for Focal, as I did browse the list of latest GPGME bugs first before reporting this bug. Attempting to build with the latest GPGME 1.17.1 (with the included ABI patch) results in exactly the same FTBFS for i386 only, so this does appear to be a distinct issue not related to that of ABI backwards compatibility.