Bug 133046 – pinentry fails when used within emacs shell buffers

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED INVALID

[Description Matthew Kennedy (RETIRED) 2006-05-11 10:22:19 UTC]

If pinentry-ncurses is invoked while in an emacs buffer then the results are as follows:

   1.  the screen is garbled
   2.  text entered into pinentry shows up as plain text
   3.  a kind of "denial of service"

More on point 3: The entire buffer must be killed, but pinentry does not die (from process list).  You cannot start another login session if you're possibly invoking pinentry from your .bash* (eg. from keychain).  I had to kill pinentry from another emacs shell buffer (emacs shell buffers are not login shells).

I think the problem might be inherent to pinentry.

It might also be related to Bug 119356.

Ideally, if the environment contains "EMACS=t", then pinentry should instead send the string "Pass phrase: " (or anything that matches the regexp in emacs's comint-password-prompt-regexp variable (eg.  \\(\\([Oo]ld \\|[Nn]ew \\|'s \\|login \\|Kerberos \\|CVS \\|UNIX \\| SMB \\|^\\)[Pp]assword\\( (again)\\)?\\|pass phrase\\|\\(Enter\\|Repeat\\|Bad\\) passphrase\\)\\(?:, try again\\
\)?\\(?: for [^:]+\\)?:\\s *\\'").

When Emacs sees text matching comint-password-prompt-regexp in the shell buffer, it switches to read unechoed characters from the minibuffer (printed with *'s etc.), which is great.  Then it sends the string it collected to the sub process but without echoing it.

[Comment 1 Matthew Kennedy (RETIRED) 2006-05-11 11:09:08 UTC]

Where I wrote:

  More on point 3: The entire buffer must be killed, but pinentry does not die
  (from process list).  

That part is actually incorrect.  Sending ^C does actually kill it in the emacs buffer.  The rest of the problems described are still accurate though.

[Comment 2 Matthew Kennedy (RETIRED) 2006-06-08 17:43:43 UTC]

Looking at the source for pinentry, looks like this would be resolves with significant work upstream, so perhaps this bug should be closed here since it isn't really our problem

[Comment 3 Matthew Kennedy (RETIRED) 2006-07-22 16:12:59 UTC]

invalidating own bug.