#761026 gpa: GPGME Error at keytable.c:150 'Unsupported certificate' renders GPA unusable

Package:
gpa
Source:
gpa
Description:
GNU Privacy Assistant (GPA)
Submitter:
Daniel Dickinson
Date:
2015-07-06 18:33:04 UTC
Severity:
normal
#761026#5
Date:
2014-09-10 03:09:06 UTC
From:
To:
Even moving away my keyring does not solve the issue that on start GPA says

The GPME library returned an unexpected error at keytable.c:150.  The was:
Unsupported certificate

This is either an installation problem or a bug in GPA.
GPA will now try to recover from the this error.

After which no key can created (when .gnupg empty) OR other times I can't even close that dialogue.

Also occurs with existing .gnupg and *.gpg

#761026#10
Date:
2014-09-10 03:23:15 UTC
From:
To:
I think that it is GNOME keyring which gets the connection to
gpg-agent (and produced the error).

Please see the message below and try to disable GNOME Keyring:

http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-devel/2013-May/027658.html

Sorry in advance, if my analysis is incorrect.

#761026#15
Date:
2014-09-10 04:58:47 UTC
From:
To:
You are in fact correct, with the caveat I am using XFCE and had the
XFCE startup option (Start GNOME Services) enabled which automatically
runs gnome-keyring with all options (including gpg agent) and there
doesn't seem to be a way to deselect that unless you turn off that
option and only select the gnome-keyring services you specifically want
(in my case gnome-keyring, for network-manager).

Perhaps the error message could be improved to suggest such an
issue/solution so that users know where to look.

Especially given the error message that is thrown it didn't occur to me
that it was not a bug or other packaging error (since the error claims
it is).

Regards,

Daniel

#761026#20
Date:
2014-09-10 05:22:25 UTC
From:
To:
[...]

Thank you for your bug report and your opinion.  The cause is GNOME
keyring, but, I agree that it's a kind of bug of GnuPG and friends
from users' point of view.

For years, I have been struggling to disable this "feature" of GNOME
Keyring.

Last month, I wrote to its maintainer (when asked):

http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-devel/2014-August/028691.html

In the message, I only addressed about smartcard/token and SSH.

Your bug report is another important case.

#761026#25
Date:
2014-09-10 10:08:39 UTC
From:
To:
Looks to me like this is #623539 [1] -

- gnupg-agent-guys, what do you say? The solution to that bug isn't
very appealing to this problem...

1 - https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=623539

#761026#34
Date:
2014-09-10 16:42:01 UTC
From:
To:
(fwiw, #623539 is assigned to gnome-keyring, not gnupg-agent)

It seems also related to:

https://bugs.debian.org/760237#203

the interaction between gpa and gpg-agent is suboptimal at best.

I think gpa needs to at least be able to detect when it needs an agent
and the agent is failing, and handle that more gracefully.

This is true for gpa regardless of who is providing the listening socket
for gpg-agent (though i completely agree that gnupg-agent and
gnome-keyring really need to find a way to play better together).

I'm not convinced by the reassignment of #761026 to gnupg-agent, and i
think i would prefer it to be reassigned back to gpa for now.

Unfortunately, i don't know how to convince gnome-keyring and
gnupg-agent to play together well.

#761026#41
Date:
2015-07-04 14:04:30 UTC
From:
To:
#761026#46
Date:
2015-07-06 18:26:49 UTC
From:
To:
hi,

I prepared a patch for the above problem ; it is patch n 3 in
http://mennucc1.debian.net/gpa/

Patch 2 adds a dependency on gnupg-agent ... it makes sense since gpa
does not work w/o

Patch 1 is a minor fix for what I proposed in 791416

patch 4 is a changelog, so that I compiled two versions for jessie i386
and jessie amd64 ; I am using them, it seems to work fine

 bye,
    a.