making key listings faster

[Werner Koch]

On Sat, 18 Mar 2000, Frank Tobin wrote:

> I will use the term 'validity' in this mesage to refer to the calculated
> trust of a key, so it will not be confused with 'ownertrust' (On a side

Yes, we should use these terms.

> This behaviour shows itself most when the key being listed has many
> signatures, leading way to me believing that this slowness may be caused
> by GnuPG trying to calculate the validity of the key

Right.

> Therefore, I am inclined to think that --fast-list should have its
> behaviour changed to only leave out calculation of the validity of a key.
> This will allow people to get information of a key such as UID's,
> ownertrust, and revoked-disabledness without getting the extremely high

This should work in most cases.  I'll see how fast I can implement it.

1.1 will probably not use the trustdb stuff anymore but a new format
for the keyrings which should speed up many things and takes away the
burden to sync the trustdb with the keyring.  The new format data
format of the keyrings will carry some precalculated values such as
key ID, fingerprint and validity.  A minor drawback is that it will
not be possble anmore to use an exported keyring fro --keyring without
importing it first.  However, import will be much faster too.


   Werner