I’m probably the last person on earth to know this but the longstanding bug between GPG and Emacs where Emacs could not open a GPG encrypted file has been fixed. Indeed, it was fixed in GPG 2.4.4 back in January.
I learned this today after spending a couple of hours trying to figure out why I could not longer send an email with mu4e. The problem was that Emacs could not open .authinfo. It took a while but then I remembered that I’d accidentally updated all my brew installed programs, GPG included. Sigh. Fortunately, I had put the recipe for downgrading to GPG 2.4.0 in my journal and just needed to downgrade GPG yet again.
If only life were that easy. GPG 2.4.0 wouldn’t build because of a missing library that was no longer available in Github. I did have it installed but for some reason the brew script couldn’t find it. During all this pain, I deleted GPG and reinstalled it with GPG 2.4.7. Suddenly, everything started working again. After a little research, I discovered that this had been fixed 11 months ago.
All this is good news because
- I can once again run the latest GPG
- I no longer have to remember to downgrade GPG every time it gets updated for some reason
I’m writing this post in the unlikely event that someone else hasn’t heard the news and is still struggling to keep GPG 2.4.0 installed or perhaps who, unlike me, figured out how to pin it in Brew. It’s easy to lose track because once you have GPG 2.4.0 running, everything works fine and you don’t think much about the problem. If you’re like me, you probably don’t use it all that much anyway so you’re not bumping up against any problems.
In any case, the problem is solved.