GPG (MingW32) defaults to revoked key/uid

M. Henry npaq.sleq at ntlworld.com
Mon Feb 14 15:59:03 CET 2011


Forgive me if this is a terribly common problem/issue, but I've had a lengthy search both of 
this list and the web generally (as well as trawling at great length through the GPG man) and 
have found nothing on it.

Being a recent convert to PGP/GPG I have been playing around a bit to get used to it before 
really deploying it in active use. I recently revoked my first key, and created another, for 
reasons of convenience I won't go into. By accident I rendered this second key unusable and 
ended up with a third, did something similar to that one and am now on a fourth (which I will 
hopefully treat much more sensibly!).

Because of this I have three revoked keys (all have been successfully revoked) and one non-
revoked key, all with at least one uid identical.

Now, when I use gpg to look up a key by any part of a uid (for example when using --edit-
key), it automatically selects the first-created _revoked_ key, not the sole non-revoked one. I 
have tried revoking and deleting specific uids from the revoked keys, but this makes no 
difference.

Obviously this causes grave problems as maybe encrypting and signing will also default to a 
revoked key - though I haven't tested really yet - but at very least it's annoying as I have to do 
--edit-key etc for the newest, active key via the hexadecimal identifier rather than uid.

Any help on sorting out this issue would be much appreciated.

Using GPG 1.4.11 (MingW32), Win XP SP3.

Thanks,
Mark Henry.



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