On archlinuc I only have gpg2. My configuration file is ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf When I go to configure Kleopatra I get a pop-up stating: Backend error: gpgconf does not seem to know the entry for dirmngr/LDAP/ldaptimeout When I close the popup I get the following error: Backend error: gpgconf does not seem to know the entry for dirmngr/LDAP/max-replies Once I close the second popup, the configuration window opens and another error windows pops up (a repeat of the first error window) : Backend error: gpgconf does not seem to know the entry for dirmngr/LDAP/ldaptimeout When I close the popup I get the following error: Backend error: gpgconf does not seem to know the entry for dirmngr/LDAP/max-replies Once I close the last popup, I can use the configuration window normally. LDAP-related settings don't get expressed in the configuration file no matter how often I do it. Restarting Kleopatra doesn't help and re-entering the configuration window creates the same problem. $ gpg --version gpg (GnuPG) 2.0.25 libgcrypt 1.6.1 Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html> This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. Home: ~/.gnupg Supported algorithms: Pubkey: RSA, ELG, DSA Cipher: IDEA, 3DES, CAST5, BLOWFISH, AES, AES192, AES256, TWOFISH, CAMELLIA128, CAMELLIA192, CAMELLIA256 Hash: MD5, SHA1, RIPEMD160, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512, SHA224 Compression: Uncompressed, ZIP, ZLIB, BZIP2
Probably not the nicest behavior (showing the error every time) but basically Kleopatra informs you that it can not configure LDAP as dirmanger has no ldap support. There are some dynamic gpgconf options depending on compiled features but LDAP support is assumed to be available afaik. A good fix for this would probably be to add a selftest for Kleopatra and use that to inform the user that LDAP is unavailable and greying out the configuration options. But on the other hand LDAP is quite important for CRL checks. You basically can not implement full S/MIME if you can not do CRL checks over ldap. You also might want to file a report with arch linux that they should build gnupg with ldap support. (I'm using gpg2 2.0.25 and "gpgconf --list-options dirmngr" shows those options)
It appears that this bug is due to https://bugs.g10code.com/gnupg/issue1590 (libgcrypt 1.6.0 forgets to initialize pth properly) filed with archlinux as https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/38560. The patch mentioned here: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/38560#comment118653 fixes the problem with dirmngr and libgcrypt which in turn fixes the problem with kleopatra.
Thanks for checking. Closing this as upstream bug.