keyserver scheme http broken?

[David Shaw]

On Nov 12, 2009, at 12:24 PM, Bernhard Reiter wrote:

> I might miss something here, but for me on gnupg 2.0.13 (and 2.0.11)
> retrieving keys via the "http://" scheme seems to be broken.
>
> (Also it seem that --search-keys does not work with "http", although  
> a lot of
> people claim that "http" is just "hkp" over port 80. )

That is not correct.

hkp is basically a convention for a keyserver that runs over HTTP on a  
different port (11371).  If you want hkp on port 80, you'd do "hkp:// 
whatever.example.com:80".  The hkp protocol specifies how keys are to  
be searched for a retrieved, using HTTP as the transport.

That's hkp.  There isn't really a *http* keyserver (in the sense of  
being a database of many keys that can be queried).  If you specify a  
http URL with the --keyserver command, you're really describing a the  
path to a particular file to fetch.  It's not really indended for that  
use, and you can't --search-keys or --recv-keys a web server.

David