auto refresh-keys

Daniel Kahn Gillmor dkg at fifthhorseman.net
Tue Jun 15 02:46:30 CEST 2010


On 06/14/2010 07:54 PM, MFPA wrote:
> On Monday 14 June 2010 at 6:19:58 PM, in
> <mid:4C1664BE.1080500 at fifthhorseman.net>, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
>> The goal, again, is to avoid auto-refresh from chewing
>> up too much space on the local disk.
> 
> Although, of course, the certifications are all part of OxDECAFDAD.asc
> and therefore are still dowmloaded and consume bandwidth. With isks in
> excess of a terabyte, why bother expending the extra CPU cycles to
> conserve a little disk space?

Your disks might be in excess of a terabyte.  The large majority of mine
aren't.  Even if mine were, given that i'd like to see GnuPG easily
available on mobile telephones and similar devices, i think disk space
is a relevant metric.  And even on the machines i use or administer that
do have disks in excess of 1TB, disk I/O is a regular source of
bottlenecks.  Writing useless material to disks in any regular fashion
is behavior to avoid.

Plus, if we can demonstrate that GnuPG cares about minimizing costs to
the user in terms of disk space, we also stand in a better rhetorical
position to encourage development (or adoption) of alternate keyserver
fetch requests that could apply similar minimization heuristics to
bandwidth.

	--dkg

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 892 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: </pipermail/attachments/20100614/39068f05/attachment-0001.pgp>


More information about the Gnupg-users mailing list