Unable to issue subkey revocation

[Andrew Gallagher]

Hi,

On 26/05/2026 00:02, marqueandreprisal--- via Gnupg-users wrote:
> My guess of what the bug is would be when the primary key has 
> been revoked gpg2 only assumes all subkeys are revoked while not 
> actually applying subkey revocation packets.

When the primary key is revoked (and particularly when it has been 
"hard" revoked, such as "key has been compromised") the entire key is 
rendered unusable. If revoking the primary key was intentional, then 
there is no pressing need to revoke the subkey also.

That said, normally when gnupg revokes a primary key, it also revokes 
all the subkeys, for avoidance of confusion (I have reproduced this 
behaviour with a fresh key). So the issue here appears to be that 
somehow the primary key was revoked without explicitly revoking the subkey.

One possible alternative explanation is that keys.openpgp.org is not 
retaining the subkey revocation on seeing the primary key revocation 
(based on my argument in the first paragraph above). Is the copy of the 
key you are working with the same one that you initially revoked, or one 
that was downloaded from keys.openpgp.org?

A