
	pinentry-xlib
	=============

Pinentry is the program called by background gpg and gpg-agent processes
to prompt the user for passwords. The stock gpg package includes several
pinentry programs, including one for the terminal using curses, and X
versions using gtk, gtk2, qt, or qt4 toolkits. These UI toolkits are
quite large, and the gtk2 pinentry ends up linked to 60 (!) shared
libraries with a combined size of 60M. Because pinentry does little
more than display a dialog box and input the password, this seems rather
excessive. So this project is a toolkit-less version of pinentry using
only the basic X API, loading only 6 shared libraries and having a
3M footprint.

There is also a similar program, ssh-askpass, used by ssh and ssh-agent
to ask for passwords. Because the API for that one is very simple,
pinentry-xlib can work as ssh-askpass too.

To compile:

./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install

pinentry and ssh-askpass use symlinks to allow keeping multiple versions
installed simultaneously, so to enable pinentry-xlib you will need to:

cd /usr/bin
rm pinentry ssh-askpass
ln -s pinentry-xlib pinentry
ln -s pinentry-xlib ssh-askpass
