gpg-agent.plugin behaves weirdly → doesn't properly honour .gnupg/gpg-agent.conf

[nasenatmer]

Hello,

just switching to oh-my-zsh since yesterday, I had to try out all the plugins relevant to me and stumbled over strange behaviour of the gpg-agent.plugin.

It seems to honour my $HOME/.gnupg/gnupg.conf file (change from pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-gtk-2 to pinentry-program /usr/bin/pintentry-qt4 is effective), however, the settings max-cache-ttl 7200 and default-cache-ttl 7200 seem not to be honoured. Instead I'm being asked for the passphrase whenever opening an encrypted mair (even after only a few seconds)

Here's my gpg-agent.conf

# Cache settings (cache for 2 hours)
max-cache-ttl 7200
default-cache-ttl 7200

#Pinentry program setting   
pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-gtk-2

# Environment file
write-env-file /home/jakob/.gnupg/gpg-agent.env

What works however…

Interestingly, if I start gpg-agent through a shellscript in /etc/profile.d, it works out nicely and gpg-agent remembers the passphrase for the set time. The gpg-agent.sh is taken from Archlinux Wiki and looks as follows:

#!/bin/sh

envfile="${HOME}/.gnupg/gpg-agent.env"
if test -f "$envfile" && kill -0 $(grep GPG_AGENT_INFO "$envfile" | cut -d: -f 2)     2>/dev/null; then
    eval "$(cat "$envfile")"
else
    eval "$(gpg-agent --daemon --write-env-file "$envfile")"
fi
export GPG_AGENT_INFO  # the env file does not contain the export statement

Additionally to that, I've got the following two lines set in my .zshrc:

GPG_TTY=$(tty)
export GPG_TTY

Why could that be?

I have the impression that it has to do with the way how gpg-agent.sh exports stuff? Could that be? Has anybody else experienced similar problems?

[nasenatmer]

Playing around with it more I found gpg-agent didn't ask for the the password every time when I started thunderbird from zsh. If however, I start thunderbird viadmenu_runor fromOpenBox menu` it asks me every time. So there clearly seems to be something wrong with the exporting of the variables.

[nasenatmer]

Few, @fwalch helped me getting to grips with how variables work so I guess this issue can be closed then.