Changing "main" user ID

[Mark Kirchner]

On Friday, September 13, 2002, 8:59:41 PM, David wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 08:26:23PM +0200, Mark Kirchner wrote:
>> Call me old-fashioned, but: All the necessary data is there, the data
>> is public (at least it's from the "public" key) and gpg runs on _my_
>> machine, so IMHO _I_ should be the one to decide how the data is
>> /displayed/. (Of course, within reasonable limits.)
>> I don't want to change someone else public key, I don't want to add to
>> or remove something from it, it's just a matter of how it's displayed
>> on my machine. (At least I interpreted your "cosmetic change" that
>> way.)
>
> That's the problem here... what happens after you export the key to
> give to a friend?  Should GnuPG strip the primary uid subpacket that
> you added?

Oh, ok, it's a subpacket, I really should have known / remebered that.
That explains a lot.

> How does it know that it was one that you added and not
> someone else?  Should it strip unhashed primary uid subpackets when
> importing keys?  Why or why not?
>
> There are sometimes very good reasons for adding unhashed data to
> self-signatures on keys you don't own (to add a MDC flag for example).
> In this case, it opens up a whole lot of potentially dangerous
> questions for something that is, after all, cosmetic.

I totally agree with you.

Before I go on further, let me point out that it's really a minor
thing, I was rather curious than being interested in seeing that point
changed in gpg (or changing it myself).
Having said that, I think it wouldn't be necessary to change or add a
subpacket: Since it's only a matter of how I prefer the key data to be
displayed, my preference could as well be stored outside the keyring
in some config-file.
But I see where this leads to: It isn't really a "problem" of gpg
itself, the same effect could (and probably should) be achieved by the
software that uses gpg and/or displays the keyring (GPGshell in my
case).

Thank you very much for the info.

Regards,
Mark Kirchner

-- 
Key (0x19DC86D3) available: http://www.mark-kirchner.de/keys/key-mk.asc