missing documentation / rant

[Martin Blais]

hi

here's a bug report / rant? for GPG 1.0.6

documentation is missing for 

     --check-trustdb [NAMES]      check the trust database
     --fix-trustdb                fix a corrupted trust database

these options don't know show up in the man page. someone really ought to do 
the grunt work of cross-checking the man page documentation with the actual 
options that gpg can accept.

these are not in the handbook nor in the FAQ either. the only thing i could 
find was stuff in the mailing-lists. in particular, i cannot help but wonder, 
why would my trustdb become corrupted, and how is it possible that it can be 
fixed (and if so, why doesn't it do that by itself?).  besides, i cannot 
figure out how to use check-trustdb, all i get is output like this:

tadora:~$ gpg --check-trustdb blais
gpg: given user IDs ignored in check_trustdb
gpg: 15 keys processed
gpg:    15 keys skipped
tadora:~$ 


also of interest:
    --allow-secret-key-import

is not mentioned on the output of "gpg --help". i'm sure there are many 
others.

i know it is not fun to do, but documentation improvement for this otherwise 
excellent piece of software is sorely needed. encryption attracts people who 
will have attention for detail and will read up on how it works, will 
experiment with it before using it, and it would be nice if the documentation 
was very, very, very consistent (it is off to a very good start, but the 
mising stuff is frustrating).

another big one (for me and other friends): the default behaviour for "gpg 
file.gpg" is to decrypt to a file "file", and apart from asking for the 
passphrase it doesn't say it has output the PLAINTEXT to a FILE. the user 
that is not careful might forget or not know that is unencrypted document 
lies in the filesystem!  that is a big problem!  IMHO that should not be the 
default behaviour, the default, just as for input, should be that it outputs 
to stdout, just like --decrypt does, and that using --decrypt should output 
to a file (plus we should get a message that says so, every functionality 
that write unencrypted data to the filesystem should warn the user).


thanks for making gpg, i really enjoy using it otherwise.
cheers,


--
M.

p.s. please Cc i'm not on this list.