Reading key capabilities information before importing a key

[Hauke Laging]

Am Do 11.04.2013, 23:43:39 schrieb Werner Koch:
> On Thu, 11 Apr 2013 22:48, branko at majic.rs said:
> > Btw, is there any particular reason why the gpg2 --with-colons key.pub
> > command does not list key capabilities?
> 
> It can't do that because it does not do any signature verification.  For
> that we would need to look at the entire key and evaluate all packets.
> --list-packets or giving a key on the command line is nothing more than
> a simple dump of the packets without any signature verification.

That is an inconsistent explanation. If --list-packets "can" show data from 
signatures without checking the signatures then obviously --with-colons 
"could" do that as well. The only valid argument I can think of is that --
list-packets may be defined as "stupid dump" and --with-colons is defined as 
showing only validated data. But the latter is obviously not the case. So if 
subkeys and UIDs are shown without checking signatures why not show unverified 
signature data like the key capabilities?

Whether that would be worth the development effort is a different question, of 
course.


Hauke
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