gpg-agent on the Mac: is it voodoo?

I have setup dozens of Linux and FreeBSD machines with gpg-agent. But, doing it on a Mac seems to be voodoo at best. I think that every howto and thread that Google turns up is missing some extremely important prerequisites. Quite honestly, I feel like I am trashing my system with all the different installers I have ran. Can someone please just reply to this and encourage me that it is possible? -- .!# RichardBronosky #!.