Problems with listing secret keys in GnuPG 1.2.1

[Werner Koch]

On Thu, 12 Jun 2003 00:57:20 -0500, Robert J Hansen said:

> With the exact same command line, this time adding " rjh" to the end, I get
> no header and the following output:

The header is a bug in the colon listing.  We have removed it for
1.2.3.

The code to list all secret keys and the one for listing selected keys
is different for historic reasons. While reqriting the entire key
selection code for 1.0.7 we had also changed the way keys are listed.
What you see in secret key listing are actually the public keys where
a secret keys is available.  For performance reasons we could not
convert the code which lists all keys.

The reason why we don't have a specific secret keyring listing anymore
(except for the above mentioned bug/problem) is due to the fact that
the secret keyblock is mostly a duplicate of the public keyblock and
it is hard to keep both in sync.  In the future we are going to remove
the secret keyring entirely and replace it with a new data structure -
this will also help to make --list-secret-keys w/o a specified user ID
work correctly and fast.



Salam-Shalom,

   Werner


-- 
Werner Koch                                      <wk at gnupg.org>
The GnuPG Experts                                http://g10code.com
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 http://fsfeurope.org