> I thought the agent is for manipulating the private key. It's also responsible for calling pinentry, which is how GnuPG receives passphrases. It's a pluggable component: on Windows you get a Windows pinentry that uses a Windows look and feel, on KDE you get a Qt one that looks like a KDE app, on GNOME you get a GTK one that looks like a GNOME app, and so on.
GnuPG sees the symmetrically encrypted message and knows it needs to recover/derive a key. It calls gpg-agent, which in turn calls pinentry. > But why do I need the agent, when no secret key is involved? I simply > want to decrypt a password-encrypted file. What possible useful role > would agent play? > > Seems to me that this is a terrible design... Let's be clear: you're passing judgment on a design without first learning what the design is. > I remember a time, when gpg was a simple, cleanly design utility that > worked. GnuPG adopted gpg-agent in large part to clean up GnuPG's design. GnuPG was introduced in GnuPG 1.9.0, released in August *2003*. You've ignored GnuPG development for so long you're surprised by a change introduced seventeen years ago. That's on you.
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