Re: gnome-keyring Checking for the availability of a secret service

["Neal H. Walfield" <neal walfield org>]

At Fri, 26 Jun 2015 09:19:23 +0200,
Tobias Mueller wrote:
> Hey hey!
>
> On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 09:14:12AM +0200, Neal H. Walfield wrote:
> > available at build time.  This is not sufficient: we need to check
> > that a secret service is actually available at run time.
> Isn't the SecretService a DBus service and shouldn't the service
> be started by DBus if it's not yet on the bus?
> Note that I'm an amateur in this field so my thinking might
> be entirely wrong.

dbus might not be available.  In my original message I mentioned
pinentry-gnome3, but, in fact, the libsecret stuff is part of the
generic code in pinentry and all pinentry's use it including
pinentry-curses and pinentry-tty.

Even if dbus is available, gnome-keyring (or whatever is implementing
the secret service) may not be installed.  I know a lot of people who
use GnuPG explicitly deinstall Gnome keyring, because (among other
issues) it is (currently) not possible to use a smartcard with GnuPG
if gnome keyring is running.  These issues have been recently resolved
upstream, but they have not yet made it into the distributions.

Thanks,

:) Neal