Self-Introduction: Timothy Murphy

Paul W. Frields stickster at gmail.com
Sun Dec 23 22:56:38 UTC 2007


On Sun, 2007-12-23 at 21:52 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> On Sunday 23 December 2007 04:42:07 pm Paul W. Frields wrote:
> 
> > > What for instance do the lines
> > > ------------------------------------------------------
> > > gpg --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net --send-key KEYNAME
> > >
> > > For KEYNAME, substitute the key ID of your primary keypair.
> > > ------------------------------------------------------
> > > actually mean?
> > > Why not just give an example instead of this abstract terminology.
> > >
> > > Assuming the "key ID" means something like "D575F650"
> > > then the advice in my experience does not work.
> >
> > I just performed this step on my machine again, using my key ID
> > "BD113717," and the procedure worked fine.
> 
> What precisely are you doing?
> 
> My statements are:
> 
> 1. It is not clear what "key ID" means.
> If you google for this term,
> you will find that the ID is normally prefaced with 0x.
> Here for example is the entry in "PGP glossary"
> ------------------------------------------------------
> To enable PGP to distinct between a username (userID) and the key ID, the 
> keyID is prefixed with 0x, for example 0xDD934139. ...
> ------------------------------------------------------

That only applies if there is a collision between a user name and a key
ID, which rarely happens in practice.  The gpg command line program
otherwise will find the right key.

> But my main point is the term "key ID" _is not clear_,
> and should be accompanied by a concrete example.
> 
> > I have done this many times, 
> > both with a prepended "0x" and without, and all of these operations
> > succeeded.
> 
> If you go to pgp.mit.edu (which appears to be the point of the exercise)
> and put in your ID without 0x, is it found?

No, but since that's not part of the process we're documenting, does it
matter in terms of our procedure?

> > I've confirmed the success using wireshark to look at the 
> > network traffic.  I think if you are having a problem -- the nature of
> > which I can't tell from the information you gave -- it might be on your
> > end.
> 
> I'm not having a problem at all.
> I'm saying that the documentation is not clear.

I've added a short paragraph in each "creating a keypair" section to
note that in most cases, using "0xNNNNNNNN" is sufficient usage.

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
           Fedora Project: http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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