Deleting signatures question.

Stewart V. Wright svwright+lists@amtp.liv.ac.uk
Fri Aug 15 12:38:03 2003


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Neil,

> > I have a question about deleting signatures on public keys...
>=20
> 1. You can only delete signatures you have made yourself.

No.  Edit a key on your key ring, select one of the UIDs (i.e. 'uid
1') and then type 'delsig'.  You can then remove other peoples
signatures - on the _local_ copy of the key.  That is what I want to
do.

> 2. If you could delete the unknown sig's, they would be replaced next tim=
e the=20
> key was imported from a keyserver

You should have read my message fully.  That was the first point I
made at the end of the message.  I learnt this lesson by being in
primary school and getting reports like "Stewart should have read the
question properly"...


> >  * I know that the next time I refresh my pubring I will get all the
> >    unwanted signatures back, but if the process is automatic I can
> >    just re-run the cleaning.
>=20
> You're not cleaning these keys - you're breaking them.

No.  I'm not breaking them.  The whole point of someone signing your
key (or more appropriately UID) doesn't change your key, it just says
that a particular key/UID is associated with a person/email.  It
doesn't break the key in any way.

> >  * This issue does not really have any relevance apart from the space
> >    that I will save by not having the unnecessary signatures on my
> >    "quota"ed account.
>=20
> Negligible. It's the public keys that take up the room - an unknown signa=
ture=20
> can only take a tiny amount of disk space. Some public keys are 4kb -=20
> especially if images are involved.

I've not tested the _actual_ sizes, just blindly went ahead and mailed
the list!  ;-)



Cheers,

S.
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