GPG support in Evolution broken (not complete)

[Alexander Brinkman]

Evolution and GnuPG (gpg) are both installed per default on Breezy (and Evolution is the default GNOME email client).

Since Evolution is able to use GPG for signing/encryprion one assumes this works out-of-the-box. Not so; Evolution requires two additional packages to be installed on the system: gnupg-agent (for communicating with the gpg application) and pinentry-gtk2 (to provide the user with a password prompt). Both these packages should be added to the default installation.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug. It works fine for me without any of those 2 packages. What happens if you try to sign a mail without them?

[Alexander Brinkman (list-abrinkman)]

As it turns out, all is my bad... ;(

I made the classic mistake of copying over my .gnupg directory from my SuSE 10.0 installation to my new Ubuntu install (to avoid having to create new keys). It turn out however that there are some differences in the setup. In gpg.conf SuSE enables the use of the gpg-agent application ("use agent") which in Evolution leads to gpg not working unless gnupg-agent and pinentry are installed. When commenting out the "use agent" line in gpg.conf Evolution also stops using the gpg-agent, and all is working fine.

I created a new .gnupg directory and the default on Ubnuntu is correct, it does not use the agent (from the comments I understood it is even old and experimental). Leaves me to wonder why SuSE 10.0 (a not-so-ancient distro) does use the gpg-agent... But this is clearly not an Ubuntu bug (sorry for the troubles).

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

No problem, thank you for replying/commenting on it. I'm closing the bug since that's not one :)