How to use preferred keyservers

[Malte Gell]

On Monday 31 May 2004 03:38, David Shaw wrote:
> So now that 1.3.6 is out and people are playing with it, here's some
> info on preferred keyservers.  There are actually two uses for
> preferred keyservers, but I'll cover the second use in a later mail.
> Remember that preferred keyservers is a new feature in 1.3.6.  It
> does not exist in 1.2.x.
>
> The main idea behind preferred keyservers is that the key owner is
> often the best person to decide how their key is distributed.  They
> thus set a preferred keyserver on the key, and anyone who wants to
> refresh the key can get it from there automatically.  Obviously,
> since the preferred keyserver lives on the key itself, it doesn't
> help anyone get the key for the first time (it's a
> chicken-and-the-egg problem).

This is really a nice feature, but can't it be expanded to fetching a 
key for the first time? With something like 
"gpg --keyserver http://homepage.foo/key.asc --recv-key 0x123456" ?

I just saw that --list-options show-keyserver-urls works only together 
with --list-sigs, is this correct? Why not show such things as well 
with --list-key if someone only wants to see such information and not 
the whole list of signatures?
IIRC the same applies as well to things like show-policy-url or 
notations which need --list-sigs and don't work with --list-key.

Malte
PS, gpg 1.3.6 really has some nice new features!