Fixing “libqca-ossl is missing”

In all honesty, I don't expect many people who might profit from this post will ever see the message below. But since common web searches don't yield anything for it (yet), I figure I should at least document it can happen. I also want to praise kwallet's author(s) because whatever went wrong yielded what turned out to be a rather useful error message rather than a spectacular crash:

createDLGroup failed: maybe libqca-ossl is missing

Here's what lead up to it: in Debian bookworm, my old Mastodon client tootle started crashing when viewing images. Its development has moved to a new client called Tuba, and even though that is not packaged yet I figured I might as well move on now rather than fiddle with tootle. Tuba, however, needs a password manager more sophisticated than the PGP-encrypted text file I use otherwise. So I bit the bullet and installed kwalletmanager; among the various password managers, it seemed to have the most reasonable dependencies.

With that, Tuba can do the oauth dance it needs to be able to communicate with the server. But when it tries to save the oauth token it gets from the Mastodon instance, I got the error message above. Tuba can still talk to the the server, but once the session is over, the oauth token is lost, and the next time I start Tuba, I have to do the oauth dance again.

Fixing the error seemed simple enough:

$ apt-file search libqca-ossl
libqca-qt5-2-plugins: /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/qca-qt5/crypto/libqca-ossl.so
$ sudo apt install libqca-qt5-2-plugins

– as I said: kwallet's is a damn good error message. Except the apt install has not fixed the problem (which is why I bother to write this post). That's because kwalletmanager starts a daemon, and that daemon is not restarted just because the plugins are installed.

Interestingly, just killing that daemon didn't seem to fix the problem; instead, I had to hit “Close“ in kwalletmanager explicitly and then kill the daemon (as in killall kwalletd):

I give you that last part sounds extremely unlikely, and it's possible that I fouled something up the first time I (thought I) killed kwalletd. But if you don't want to do research of your own: Just hit Close and relax.

You could also reasonably ask: Just what is this “ossl” thing? Well… I have to admit that password wallets rank far down in my list of interesting software categories, and hence I just gave up that research once nothing useful came back when I asked Wikipedia about OSSL.