Odd keyserver problem

[David Shaw]

On Sun, Dec 03, 2006 at 02:46:44PM +0100, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> At Sun, 3 Dec 2006 00:33:52 -0500,
> David Shaw wrote:
> > > Generally when knowing the key ID you'd just use gpg --recv-key
> > > 0x7108E308 though.
> > 
> > This is true, but nevertheless people sometimes do --search-key on a
> > key ID (I'm not really sure why).  I have fixed this to work again for
> > the next release.
> 
> Well, I have a theory.
> 
> First, the key ID is not consistently displayed in this form.  In
> fact, the key ID is consistently displayed without the 0x prefix.
> Also, there is a strong motivation to use cut&paste with key IDs,
> because it's so cumbersome to enter random hex strings manually.

Sure, but that's not exactly what I was wondering about.  I was
wondering why people did --search-key on a key ID at all, rather than
--recv-keys.  --search-key only finds the key, and doesn't retrieve
and import it until the user selects it.  Since (virtually all of the
time), searching for a key ID will find exactly one response, it's not
as if there are choices in which key to select :)

Nevertheless, 0x will now work in --search-key.  I'm actually going to
make one more change so that it works without 0x as well (which isn't
a regression - it never worked).  As you point out, a key ID, even
without 0x, is very distinguishable from a user ID.

David