I found two issues in libgpg-error for spawning functions.

POSIX documentation never says that PSHARED=0 prevents sharing among processes. In my opinion, it still conforms to POSIX even when a PSHARED=0 semaphore can be shared between parent and child processes.

I've tried the new patch in my environment, and it fixes the gnupg HEAD self tests as well. Thank you!

In tests/migrations, (unlike tests/openpgp and tests/cms), the tests do not prepare gpg-agent, but it is gpg which invokes gpg-agent if needed.
Because of that, on NetBSD (where POSIX semaphore has a different semantics), it hangs with gpg --list-secret-key, when gpg tries to spawn the gpg-agent process.
In the old code of 2.4, it simply ignore the npth_protect and npth_unprotect when calling fork to spawn a process.
New code in libgpg-error cares about npth_protect and npth_unprotect but it was not sufficient; We need to care about NetBSD's semantics. Child process should not call npth_protect. With shared semantics, child process's calling npth_protect affects to cause parent process: it hangs.

@wiz Thank you for your quick feedback.

Thank you for the patch. I've tried it in my environment, and gnupg 987c6a398a9505399b2c25a775d4b625753bc962 passes all its self-tests for me now!

Oh yeah, the mentioned patch is bogus because it assumes that fgets has already set the eof flag while reading the last line. This seems not to be the case.

Thank you for the log.

CVE-2026-24882 has been assigned to this issue.

I added the gpgsm log output (same error as in the gpg log)

Ah, thanks for the pointer, I did not expect gpgsm to behave differently here. Then it's probably intentional and I'll close this as invalid.

The gnupg manual (page 113) mentions:

Thank you for looking at this.
I'm testing with gnupg git head as of today, please let me know if you prefer 2.5.17 instead.

Thank you for your report.

This string comes from the Windows API and thus it is a Windows bug. It maye take some decades until this get fixed but at least they have meanwhile sfxed the "Westeuropäische Zeit" zu the correct "Mitteleuropäische Zeit" - Modulo Umlaut problems.

I bisected it and found the commit that introduced this test failure:

In the same environment, 2.4.9 passes its self tests.
I've reverted the update in pkgsrc until this can be resolved.

The previous pkgsrc version was 2.4.9. However, I've just tested 2.5.14 and saw the same behaviour (so I guess there is no point in testing 2.5.16).

Do you remember wether you had the same problem also with 2.5.14 or 2.5.16? Or can you test with these versions? Which version of libgpg-error are you using?

My actual plan is to rework the imp[ort/export of secret keys to gpg-agent. Right now gpg-agent has knowledge of OpenPGP for import/export. This is not good and the required conversion should be moved to a helper tools for easier testing and to have this out of the gpg-agent process. For Kyber we right now don't use any conversion mut store the secret keys in gpg-agent's native format. Thus the passphrase is not necessary. We need to figure out why we have this problem here.

Option works in Gpg4win-5.0.1 with GnuPG 2.5.17

works in Gpg4win 5.0.1 with GnuPG 2.5.17

To reproduce the hang, a loop will suffice (usually happens within the first 15 times, once it needed 50 runs):

There's no other configuration, this happens with a clean gnupghome with one smime cert + root cert and the above gpgsm.conf (output on stdin/stderr):

Reconsidering this all I don't think it makes any sense to distinguish between (-1) and GPG_ERR_INV_PACKET. We use (-1) for a too short read of the hashed or unhashed area (premature eof). INV_PACKET is for unknown versions, too much data (arbitrary limit), bad parameters, and underflow. Let's forget my previous comment and always use INV_PACKET.

Please run with --debug 0 which should show you which confiration files are read in which order. Is there anything in a common.conf file? A log-file statement tehre would overwrite the command line option.