Package: gnupg
Version: 2.1.18-8~deb9u4
Severity: grave
Justification: renders package unusable

Dear Maintainer,

I am logged into an XFCE session on my desktop computer, and that session is 
locked. I am now working on my laptop, which is at a remote location from my 
desktop computer, and I am logged into my desktop computer using ssh, without X 
forwarding.

When I try to unlock a private key using GPG on the ssh session, it contacts 
the gpg-agent program, which pops up a requester window for my passphrase on my 
desktop XFCE session. However, I am not at that computer, so I cannot provide 
it with a passphrase.

This makes it impossible for me to unlock the private key, without travelling 
to my desktop computer.

This has only become a problem since I upgraded my desktop computer from jessie 
to stretch, and therefore from gnupg1 to gnupg2.

The problem is that passphrase prompts now are centrally controlled, which 
fundamentally breaks the way that computers are used - you log in from various 
different places. The passphrase prompt must go to the session that caused the 
passphrase to be needed. Any other action is completely insane.

I note that it is not even possible to give gnupg2 an option to tell it not to 
use an agent.

I am justifying the severity marking of this bug report, because it does 
prevent gnupg working correctly in the majority of its use cases. If there is a 
nice simple on/off switch that makes it behave sanely that I have missed, then 
please downgrade the severity and document it.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.12
  APT prefers oldstable
  APT policy: (500, 'oldstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-0.bpo.6-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), 
LANGUAGE=en_GB:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages gnupg depends on:
ii  gnupg-agent    2.1.18-8~deb9u4
ii  libassuan0     2.4.3-2
ii  libbz2-1.0     1.0.6-8.1
ii  libc6          2.24-11+deb9u4
ii  libgcrypt20    1.7.6-2+deb9u3
ii  libgpg-error0  1.26-2
ii  libksba8       1.3.5-2
ii  libreadline7   7.0-3
ii  libsqlite3-0   3.16.2-5+deb9u1
ii  zlib1g         1:1.2.8.dfsg-5

Versions of packages gnupg recommends:
ii  dirmngr     2.1.18-8~deb9u4
ii  gnupg-l10n  2.1.18-8~deb9u4

Versions of packages gnupg suggests:
pn  parcimonie  <none>
pn  xloadimage  <none>

-- no debconf information

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