SKS Protocol

[John Clizbe]

Nicholas Cole wrote:
> 
> Dear John,
> 
> Thank you.  Yes, I feared I'd have to learn to read Ocaml! :-)

Reading Ocaml is fairly easy. It's the thinking in a functional manner as
opposed to an imperative one that takes the effort.

The best place to start is the Ocaml Resources page. [0]
It has links to the language manual[1] and the standard library [2].
Version 4.00 of the Ocaml language was just released. We target version 3.11
and greater.

There are many more online. Email me off-list at the top address in my sig
block and I'll supply names and links. Do not bother with the book 'Practical
Ocaml' -- I received that advice too late, but I did not pay full price.

For the SKS source, I would suggest the trunk. There have been a LOT of
changes since 1.1.3. You may either clone it [3] or download a tarball[4] from
the 'get source' link on the project's Source tab (.zip, .gz, & .bz2 are
available).

> I was mostly interested in exactly how they made the hash of each key, but
> it's also a really interesting and subtle problem they've fixed in getting
> such reliable and rapid distribution of the database.

I need to go check before I answer, but I can tell you hashes are 128 bits.

-John

[0] http://caml.inria.fr/resources/index.en.html
[1] http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml-4.00/index.html
[2] http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml-4.00/libref/index.html
[3] hg clone https://bitbucket.org/skskeyserver/sks-keyserver
[4] https://bitbucket.org/skskeyserver/sks-keyserver/get/ac4a7159ca28.tar.bz2

-- 
John P. Clizbe                      Inet: John (a) Gingerbear DAWT net
SKS/Enigmail/PGP-EKP                  or: John ( @ ) Enigmail DAWT net
FSF Assoc #995 / FSFE Fellow #1797  hkp://keyserver.gingerbear.net  or
     mailto:pgp-public-keys at gingerbear.net?subject=HELP

Q:"Just how do the residents of Haiku, Hawai'i hold conversations?"
A:"An odd melody / island voices on the winds / surplus of vowels"

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