DEBIAN, EMACS, and GPG-AGENT
April 22, 2019

Apparently, the folks at Debian are opposed to allowing emacs
to handle gnupg passphrase entry. See the discussion here:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=854797

They are convinced it introduces a security vulnerability, and
I don't know enough about the issues to know whether they are
right. I am curious, though, why other distros allow it.

UPDATE 2019-04-25: I figured out a work-around. If you will not
be installing a graphical environment on your Debian box, you
can uninstall gnupg and then install gnupg1. Then, create a
gpg symlink to /usr/bin/gpg1. Emacs will now prompt for gpg
passwords in the mini-buffer rather than calling the gpg-agent.