How to fix "ERROR key_generate 3355453" / "GENKEY' failed: IPC call has been cancelled"

[Peter Lebbing]

On 04/09/18 09:52, Fiedler Roman wrote:
> Maybe the current hammer documentation should be updated, to remove
> the "--use-as-hammer" options? Or at least declare, that they shall not
> be used that way. See:
> 
> https://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/r1606.html
> https://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/r1574.html

Ah, but you didn't pass it a keyring, did you? You passed it an exported
OpenPGP key, which is no longer the format of a keyring! :-)

> Werner gave a good solution in another followup message.

Yes, the new option to *encrypt* to a key in a file made me forget about
the age-old gpgv :-). I got it mixed up.

> Or could I submit patches to documentation and source code (error handling)
> myself? I did not find a "contribute" section on the gnupg website at a first glance
> (menus/FAQs), but could look into it deeper, if helpful.

I'd say: definitely. I'm not a GnuPG dev, though. I think for instance
the git repository with the man page can be reached through the web on [1].

Note that if you were to carefully read the long table of contents of
the "GnuPG manual"[2], you'd stumble upon these entries:

> 8 Helper Tools
> [...]
> 8.2 Verify OpenPGP signatures

I think your addition to the man page would be helpful, but a balance
has to be struck between documenting what something does and what it
does not. Writing good, clear documentation is hard. I don't think the
current documentation is as good as it could be. The fact that there are
so many options and commands makes it very hard to do right. In the
current state of the documentation, I think your addition is a good one.
More in general, I think there should be documentation that users read
which means they wouldn't end up at the man page for the gpg
command-line tool at all, but they would immediately have chosen gpgv in
the first place. I hope I'm succeeding in getting my intention across,
I'm having some trouble putting it in words :-).

man pages are reference works, not user guides. You already know how to
use something, but the details elude you for a moment? You grab a
reference. You can't learn English from a dictionary, and you can't
efficiently look up the spelling of a word in an English course.

In this particular case, what set you off in the wrong direction was
that you were doing something which was never *intended* to work, it
just did. Worse, people have been telling other people that this was
something you could do. I think it's hard to catch all these things in
documentation when at the same time people on the interwebs are saying
"oh you should use an exported key as keyring".

HTH,

Peter.

[1] <https://dev.gnupg.org/source/gnupg/browse/master/doc/gpg.texi>
[2] <https://gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg/#SEC_Contents>

-- 
I use the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) in combination with Enigmail.
You can send me encrypted mail if you want some privacy.
My key is available at <http://digitalbrains.com/2012/openpgp-key-peter>

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