making key listings faster

[Frank Tobin]

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Disclaimer: I am not familiar with how GnuPG gets its information for
listing keys.

I will use the term 'validity' in this mesage to refer to the calculated
trust of a key, so it will not be confused with 'ownertrust' (On a side
note, I think NAI got it right with the term 'validity', instead of
'trust').


Problem:

If I want the normally-gathered information from '--with-colons', this
procedure can be _very_ slow.

This problem will be a serious one for me in particular, as in my program
pgpenvelope, I wish to present users with, say, those keys looked up by
'ftobin@uiuc.edu', EXCEPT those which are disabled or revoked.  This seems
like a simple request, but doing so requires me to use '--with-colons'
(without '--fast-list-mode') to find out which keys are revoked or
disabled.  This can require a HUGE performance hit.


Analysis:

This behaviour shows itself most when the key being listed has many
signatures, leading way to me believing that this slowness may be caused
by GnuPG trying to calculate the validity of the key

I would further venture those operations other than calculating the
validity of a key have little overhead compared to calculating the
validity, as calculating the validity would be the only one requiring real
processing (the fields filled in just being lookups).

Hence, I would further venture that the speed --fast-list gets is from its
not calculating of the validity of a key, not from the absence of the
other things left out, such as UIDs or ownertrust, or
revoked/disabled-ness.


Proposed Solution:

Therefore, I am inclined to think that --fast-list should have its
behaviour changed to only leave out calculation of the validity of a key.
This will allow people to get information of a key such as UID's,
ownertrust, and revoked-disabledness without getting the extremely high
performance hit of not using this option with --with-colons.


- -- 
Frank Tobin		http://www.neverending.org/~ftobin/

"To learn what is good and what is to be valued,
those truths which cannot be shaken or changed."  Myst: The Book of Atrus





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