In a previous post I showed how to work around a deadlock between GnuPG and Emacs. As a brief recap, GnuPG 2.4.1 introduced a change in its output which breaks a protocol that Emacs relied on, so I pinned GnuPG to version 2.4.0 on my system to avoid the bug. Damien Cassou reached out to me and expressed a preferred way of dealing with this issue: patch the current version of GnuPG so it doesn’t contain the bug.
As some of you may know, I practically live inside Emacs. And like a lot of Emacs users a good portion of that time is spend in org-mode, a package that is hard to describe due to its overwhelming large number of features. One of the many ways I use org-mode is to implement a Getting Things Done (GTD) workflow. That is, managing all of the projects that I’m trying to push forward as well as all of the routine recurring tasks that I have to deal with on a daily basis.
GnuPG 2.4.1 was released all the way back in May but I failed to notice until I upgraded to NixOS 23.11 a few weeks ago. And I only noticed because Emacs froze when I tried to save an encrypted file. It didn’t take me long to realize it was due to a change in GnuPG. Emacs and Encrypted Files When working with encrypted files Emacs goes to great lengths to ensure the unencrypted cleartext is never written to the file system.