Skip to content

GCR-4 takes over ssh-agent and ssh-askpass after 4.2.1

Description:

I’m a KDE user and I noticed that ssh password prompts changed to a new GUI recently. It turned out to be GCR's implementation.

It looks like GCR's ssh-agent (gcr-ssh-agent.socket) has been always running, but the latest unit file starts to inject the environment variable:

ExecStartPost=-/usr/bin/systemctl --user set-environment SSH_AUTH_SOCK=%t/gcr/ssh

The behavior (automatically start + setting the envvar) appears to be intrusive for non-Gnome users in my opinion.

I looked at pacman.log but I couldn't figure out exactly why gcr-4 was installed. It was automatically installed on 2022-11-04 when I upgraded the system. Perhaps it was required by some legitimate Gnome software which I used in the past. It's only required by libnma which is an optional dependency of some packages now. So I simply uninstalled gcr-4 to restore the ssh-askpass.

Additional info:

To upload designs, you'll need to enable LFS and have an admin enable hashed storage. More information