Re: b4 review silently freezes on patatt fail

On Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:22:27 +0100, Lorenzo Stoakes wrote:
> Hi Konstantin,
> 
> I noticed a bug in b4 review (as pinged on fedi but better to send the bug
> report properly :)
> 
> So I had an incorrect configuration locally - my signing key in git (git config
> user.signingKey) was set to the wrong one (the old, revoked one, the one
> I... err... lost the private key for :P).
> 
> And with this in place, I was using b4 review tui --email-dry-run to experiment
> with composing a reply.
> 
> The replying bit worked fine. But when I hit 'S' to send it froze up. No error
> shown, just frozen.
> 
> Some strace's later and I identified that gpg (of course) was to blame - it
> seems the python code just hangs waiting forever (idle event loop looks like).
> 
> And it seems to be when it tried to use patatt to sign my reply to a mail, gpg
> failed with exit code 2:
> 
> execve("/usr/bin/gpg", ["gpg", "--batch", "--no-auto-key-retrieve",
> "--no-auto-check-trustdb", "-s", "-u", "130EC0891A27271B"]) = 0
> exit_group(2)
> 
> (I can give you a full strace if you need!)
> 
> I confirmed this was the signing for sure as passing --no-sign fixed it.
> 
> Once I updated my signing key to the correct one, everything worked fine.
> 
> $ b4 --version
> 0.15.2

This was more of a rabbit hole than I was expecting and required a new 
patatt version release. The underlying issue was actually that gpg 
invokes gpg-agent, and non-zero exits from it caused a hang due to how 
we were handling pipes.

Anyway, I believe this is now fixed and shouldn't resurface.

Thanks for the report!

-- 
Konstantin Ryabitsev <[email protected]>