long keyIDs

[Kevin.Christian at lsil.com]

Can someone please educate me about the finer points of long vs short keyIDs?

I'm trying to help with the ingration of GPG support for exmh. Exmh currently
uses the status-fd output to obtain the keyID. This keyID is returned by GPG
in long format. Unfortunately, it seems the long format is not accepted by
the keyservers I have access to.

I can make changes to exmh so that keyIDs are truncated to their short form.
However, how safe is this operation? Should I restrict the truncation to just
dealing with keyservers or can I always use short keyIDs? Are there keyservers
that take long keyIDs?

Thanks for any advice.

Kevin