A Blast From The Past: Making Gnupg Work With Emacs

I was a little bored today so I thought, “I know, I’ll upgrade all the programs I’ve installed with homebrew.” There were 58 of them that were out of date so it was probably time. I fired off

brew upgade

and sat back to wait for it to complete. I was watching the results fly by and I saw gnupg being upgraded and I thought, “Damn. Now gnupg is broken again when invoked from Emacs.” That’s because Gnupg versions after 2.4.1 have a conflict with Emacs.

The solution is to downgrade to version 2.4.0 but that can be a pain if you use brew to install Gnupg. Happily Álvaro Ramírez has a quick and easy solution that I wrote about here. I searched Irreal for the post and re-downgraded Gnupg. It would be nice if there was some way of telling brew not to upgrade certain packages but in the meantime it’s pretty easy to downgrade it¹.

Michael Alan Dorman commented to my original post with another, easier way of solving the problem. I haven’t tried it but if you’re experiencing the problem (on any OS) it may be worth giving it a try.

In any event, consider this a PSA for when you encounter the problem initially or subsequently like I did.