bemenu environment variables are ignored

[ayushnix]

When using pinentry-bemenu v0.7.1, the environment variables for bemenu set using BEMENU_OPTS are not used. Is this expected?

[t-8ch]

It should work and does for me.

[ayushnix]

They aren't being used on my laptop

$ env | rg -i bemenu
BEMENU_OPTS=-i -l 10 -w --scrollbar=autohide -n --fn 'PT Mono 16'

$ cat .gnupg/gpg-agent.conf
pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-bemenu

The BEMENU_OPTS environment variable is used when I use bemenu for other purposes but not when used as pinentry-bemenu.

Any ideas what could be wrong on my setup? Anything else I should set or check?

[t-8ch]

This is the environment of your usersession. gpg-agent is likely started from your systemd user instance which uses a different environment. Try to to systemctl --user edit gpg-agent and add

[Service]
Environment=BEMENU_OPTS=...

[t-8ch]

Afterwards:

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user restart gpg-agent

[ayushnix]

I created a file .config/environment.d/10-bemenu.conf with the BEMENU_OPTS value and restarted gpg-agent and reloaded the user session daemon.

$ systemctl --user show-environment | rg -i bemenu
BEMENU_OPTS=$'--ignorecase --list 10 --wrap --scrollbar=autohide --no-overlap --fn "PT Mono 16"

Just to be sure, I also added BEMENU_OPTS to the gpg-agent.service file as well and restarted everything but still no success.

[t-8ch]

Why is there a dollar and a lone single quote? To see if the process actually got the env variable you can look at /proc/$PID/environ

[ayushnix]

Why is there a dollar and a lone single quote?

There was an ending single quote which I forgot to add but yeah, I'm not sure why the BEMENU_OPTS environment variable is exported like this. Here's how the relevant file looks like

$ cat .config/environment.d/13-bemenu.conf
BEMENU_OPTS='--ignorecase --list 10 --wrap --scrollbar=autohide --no-overlap --fn "PT Mono 16"'

To see if the process actually got the env variable you can look at /proc/$PID/environ

It seems so. Here's a somewhat redacted output.

$ ps -ef | rg -i gpg-agent
user     2446     954  0 14:35 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/gpg-agent --supervised
$ cat /proc/2446/environ
HOME=/home/userLANG=en_US.UTF-8LANGUAGE=en_US:enSYSTEMD_EXEC_PID=2446USER=userXDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000BEMENU_OPTS=--ignorecase --list 10 --wrap --scrollbar=autohide --no-overlap --fn "PT Mono 16"DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/run/user/1000/busI3SOCK=/run/user/1000/sway-ipc.1000.968.sockSWAYSOCK=/run/user/1000/sway-ipc.1000.968.sockWAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1.....

I really wish that bemenu used a config file instead of environment variables.

[t-8ch]

The problem is that --ignorecase is not implemented. For compatibility with the original pinentry tool unknown cli options do not prevent the tool from running. On the other hand the first unknown option stops the option parsing.

I'll think about a way of handling this better.

[ayushnix]

The problem is that --ignorecase is not implemented.

You mean in pinenetry-bemenu?

I removed that option from the env var and restarted services but pinentry-bemenu still doesn't pick up the the BEMENU_OPTS env var.

[t-8ch]

Yes, wrap etc are also not suppored. If you execute pinentry-bemenu standalone with the env variable it should give you output about the unsupported options.

[ayushnix]

Hmm, got it. I was able to get pinentry-bemenu to use the BEMENU_OPTS env var after removing --ignorecase --list 10 --wrap --scrollbar=autohide.

Perhaps the README.md file should contain the list of flags supported by pinentry-bemenu and point out that other flags aren't supported?

[t-8ch]

--ignorecase, --list and --wrap are now supported. Isn't the output from --help enough?

[ayushnix]

--ignorecase, --list and --wrap are now supported.

Thanks.

Isn't the output from --help enough?

It might be but I didn't have any reason to believe that those options would be unsupported until I faced this issue. Maybe I'm at fault here but I didn't think of checking --help until now.

Also, I'm not sure if this a limitation with bemenu itself but all the contents of the prompt are printed on a single line with a few ↵ symbols in between. Is this intended? Can the password prompt be segregated into multiple lines? Let me know if I should open another issue for this.

[t-8ch]

I'll try to figure out a way of reporting issues better.

As for the lines: This is fixed in a later version of pinentry-bemenu.

[ayushnix]

Thanks.

[t-8ch]

You're welcome!