Gpg Update Goes Wrong
13 Sep 2023
Table of Contents
Situation
Today I faced an issue that my notes of today and yesterday could not be stored. When storing the file, undo-tree reported to have finished writing. However, emacs does not seem to get the control back. It seems to hang. This is strange behaviour.
Steps to reproduce
I tried first to reset emacs. This did not change the behaviour. But since the store of a file did not succeed, changes where not stored correctly (to start with). The next try wat to change the debug-on-quit variable to true. This triggers the debugger when hitting C-g. Doing this reviled to me an issue with GPG. As I could not find out what was going on, I started my search.
NOTE: I did install a package this morning using brew. This led to some updated packages as well.
Solution
After searching some pages on internet, I came by a post on reddit.com that contained a clue: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/137r7j7/gnupg_241_encryption_issues_with_emacs_orgmode/. It seems that gnuGP had an update that could be the issue.
I validated my version:
gpg --version
The result was that I installed GPG 2.4.3. According to the page provided, this version contained an issue. Looking at the git of gnupg I found that the fix is solved in version 2.6. As this is not yet available, it was only possible to revert the version.
I used the following procedure to revert.
brew tap-new --no-git my/local
brew extract --version 2.4.0 gnupg my/local
brew install my/local/gnupg@2.4.0
And this solved all my issues.