This is now ready for testing.

pinentry-emacs is obsolete. It's for older Emacs (<= 25, IIUC) which had lisp/pinentry.el.
For Emacs 26 and newer, you can simply use epa-pinentry-mode having the value of loopback.

works now

Thanks for your help @gniibe and apologies for wasting your time. It looks like this is an issue with ncurses on musl systems and I'll pursue it there. I have a patch to their configure which works & fixes building pinentry.

I've reported it on bug-ncurses@ to get some insight: https://marc.info/?l=ncurses-bug&m=166268018624805&w=2.

Mysteriously, I get nothing:

$ pkg-config --cflags nurses

Could you please check what pkg-config --cflags ncurses returns?
In my environment (of Debian), it returns:

It looks like there was a problem similar to this a while ago: https://dev.gnupg.org/T2320 where it turned out for unicode ncurses builds, a specific header had to be included, but that workaround seems to have been removed from pinentry since.

In T6085#162918, @ebo wrote:

well, when creating openPGP keys with kleopatra I did not see any hints. I do not think that the issue would be vaild for password based encryption. There the common usecase is autogeneration, anyway

In T6085#162921, @aheinecke wrote:

@ikloecker yes as mentioned in my response the current hints are only for symmetric.

@ikloecker yes as mentioned in my response the current hints are only for symmetric.

well, when creating openPGP keys with kleopatra I did not see any hints. I do not think that the issue would be vaild for password based encryption. There the common usecase is autogeneration, anyway

The long hint is "hidden" in the tooltip of the short hint.

And the issue for which @ebo opened this ticket is in my opinion that you have to fail first before you see the hint.

I think there was a misunderstanding here. We already set .pinentry.constraints.hint.long and .pinentry.constraints.hint.short in GnuPG-VSD but firstly they are only about symmetric.
And the issue for which @ebo opened this ticket is in my opinion that you have to fail first before you see the hint.

Fully done in my opinion.

This is in for so long we can mark it as resolved. I had tested it on Windows.

That's a fair point, cheers!

In T6161#162306, @ikloecker wrote:

I'm not sure I understand. If you don't want pinentries depending on libX11, then simply disable those pinentries with --disable-pinentry-qt5, etc. For Wayland it may make sense to allow disabling it.

I'm not sure I understand. If you don't want pinentries depending on libX11, then simply disable those pinentries with --disable-pinentry-qt5, etc. For Wayland it may make sense to allow disabling it.

Let's turn this into a feature request.

Fixed in 1.2.1.

Fixed in 1.2.1.

Fixed in 1.2.1.

At least, pinentry-qt offers this functionality since 1.2.0 (see T5517: Improvements for symmetric encryption).

Isn't this (mostly?) done? See T5517: Improvements for symmetric encryption.

pinentry 1.2.1 has been released today

Fix issues found while testing with NVDA.