GnuPG race causes misordered uids?

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Mon, May 05, 2003 at 11:23:08PM -0400, David Shaw wrote:
> Okay, I looked at this and what seems to be the problem is that some
> of the user IDs were generated in the same second.  That foils the
> current user ID sorting algorithm.

But why are the results non-deterministic on a sequence of read-only
operations?

> That may explain the problem you saw, but I think this isn't good
> behavior in general for GnuPG.  If the "first uid is primary" behavior
> is going to be depended on by other programs, then we must guarantee
> that this is always true.  It doesn't really matter what is used as
> the secondary sorting key, so long as it is reliable.  I'm tempted to
> use the raw signature packet data - it's easily accessible, and is
> absurdly unlikely to collide.

The one-second resolution is a common problem in timestamping.
I don't really care what the end result will be, as long as the users are
happy and the output is deterministic :)

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU      http://www.gnu.org    marcus at gnu.org
Marcus Brinkmann              The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
Marcus.Brinkmann at ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/