Bug: Unusable key

[Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder]

On Monday 09 February 2004 19.41, Steve Butler wrote:
> There are so many different reasons why a Public key might not be usable.
> Trying to address them in an elegant error message will lead to frustration
> for both the developers and the consumers.

I feel that if there are many different error conditions are possible, many 
different error messages should be output (at least when a --verbose option 
is given).

Of course, we could all be going back to the times where we had messages like 
'An Error Occurred', and just shorten the relevant kernel header to only 
#define EERROR instead of all the different EXXX codes, but I guess that's 
not where we want to go.

Seriously: I think people here are mixing up two different problems, namely
 - reporting errors that happen while trying to use a public key and
 - presenting these errors in a useful way to users who might not know all the 
details.

IMHO the first item should focus on accuracy, and is the task of commandline 
gnupg, while the second item is best left to the programmers of MUAs and 
other gnupg-using software.

cheers
-- vbi

-- 
featured product: Debian GNU/Linux - http://debian.org
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