Odd keyserver problem

[Marcus Brinkmann]

At Sun, 3 Dec 2006 00:33:52 -0500,
David Shaw wrote:
> > Generally when knowing the key ID you'd just use gpg --recv-key
> > 0x7108E308 though.
> 
> This is true, but nevertheless people sometimes do --search-key on a
> key ID (I'm not really sure why).  I have fixed this to work again for
> the next release.

Well, I have a theory.

First, the key ID is not consistently displayed in this form.  In
fact, the key ID is consistently displayed without the 0x prefix.
Also, there is a strong motivation to use cut&paste with key IDs,
because it's so cumbersome to enter random hex strings manually.

A programmer's rule of thumb is "be strict in what you output, and
liberal in what input you accept".  Reversing it does not do any good.

Also, software should just do what's "right".  At least from the user
perspective, a key ID (even without the 0x prefix) is perfectly
distinguishable from a user ID component in most if not all cases.
Sure, this is not actually true.  But for all practical purposes it is.

Thanks,
Marcus