Comment # 3 on bug 1051035 from Ralf Friedl

(In reply to Michael Andres from comment #2)
> @Ralf Please confirm that you agents do not vanish, even after a couple of
> minutes. In this case we should pass the bug to the gpg maintainer.
I only started to investigate because I noticed around 50 gpg-agent processes
shown with "zypper ps -s" after updating. At first I thought strange, but they
may be needed, then I noticed the arguments with the temporary directories
indicating zypper, so I killed them.

But I have a machine where I didn't kill them. It seems the oldest processes
are from May, which should qualify for more than a few minutes.

Note that I don't use gpg-agent, which is why I have no problem using killall
gpg-agent. Maybe gpg doesn't start a new agent if it finds one running,
although that would also be wrong according to your comment #1 it is separate
from the user keyring.

# for i in $(pidof gpg-agent); do echo /proc/$i; done | xargs ls -lrtd
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 May 20 15:17 /proc/6906
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 May 20 15:30 /proc/7747
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 May 20 18:05 /proc/11915
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 May 22 14:30 /proc/6563
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 May 22 14:30 /proc/6549
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 May 22 15:30 /proc/8254
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 May 30 15:30 /proc/8551
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 May 30 15:30 /proc/8538
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 May 30 23:33 /proc/28076
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 May 30 23:33 /proc/28095
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 Jun 21 19:26 /proc/23659
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 Jun 21 19:26 /proc/23667
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 Jun 23 18:57 /proc/23922
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 Jun 23 18:57 /proc/23932
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 Jun 23 18:58 /proc/24065
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 Jul 11 14:55 /proc/2336
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 Jul 11 14:55 /proc/2344
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 Jul 11 14:56 /proc/2554
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 Jul 11 15:13 /proc/10997
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 Jul 11 15:13 /proc/11044
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 Jul 11 15:14 /proc/11174
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 Jul 17 10:39 /proc/15588
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 Jul 17 10:39 /proc/15596
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 Jul 17 10:40 /proc/15919
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 Jul 17 10:42 /proc/16122
dr-xr-xr-x 9 root root 0 Jul 18 11:58 /proc/8693

You are correct that gpg-agent is started by gpg, so the maintainer should know
that the documentation says that --use-standard-socket has no effect. Actually,
gpg-agent says the same:
write(2, "gpg-agent[20560]: WARNING: \"--use-standard-socket", 49) = 49
write(2, "\" is an obsolete option - it has no effect\n", 43) = 43

gpg only launches gpg-agent after it has read the key from the command line,
and the key is not imported into the agent. Than about once a minute the agent
forks a process that connects to the agent, does "GETINFO pid" and "BYE".