name field restriction when creating key

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Thu 2017-04-13 19:07:01 +0200, steve (GPGTools) wrote:

> we've recently noticed that gnupg imposes some interesting
> restrictions on the name field when creating a key. The name can
> either be empty or must have a minimum of 5 characters. Since that
> strikes us as kind of odd, we were wondering if someone could shed
> some light on why it was implemented this way.
>
> We're thinking of removing this restriction in GPG Keychain (by using
> the --batch option) and also wanted to make sure that the removal
> doesn't cause any potential incompatibilities or other problems.

I also recommend that toolkit developers (like gpgtools) should use
--quick-gen-key (assuming you're depending on the 2.1.x branch of GnuPG,
which you should be in 2017), which accepts an arbitrary string as the
full User ID (no distinction between different "fields" at all).

         --dkg