Setting default UID

David Shaw dshaw@jabberwocky.com
Wed Jul 25 15:55:02 2001


On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 01:48:07PM +0200, Janusz A. Urbanowicz wrote:

> John Goerzen wrote/napisal[a]/schrieb:
> > I recently added a new UID to my public key but now GPG wants it to be
> > the default for everything. I want one of my existing UIDs to be the
> > default, but I cannot find any documentation ANYWHERE on how to find
> > this. With gpg --edit, gpg seems to put a dot next to the default
> > uid, but there is not even any mention of this in the manual. Ideas?
>
> There is NO default uid in OpenPGP. The ID that is using in determining key
> structure is the numerical UID which is the same for all the textual UIDs.
> The 'default' textual UID is the last one added (determined by time of
> self-signing) and it is displayed in key revieving for convenience only.
> Please note that after importing ypur key, someone may have another textual
> UID displayed at your key as 'default'.
That's not completely true. There actually is a "primary user ID" packet defined for OpenPGP. The catch is that while I believe gnupg will do the right thing if it sees such a packet, it doesn't yet provide a way to generate such a packet. David -- David Shaw | dshaw@jabberwocky.com | WWW http://www.jabberwocky.com/ +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ "There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence." - Jeremy S. Anderson