Making the case for smart cards for the average user

[Ben McGinnes]

On 18/03/2015 4:38 am, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> On Mon 2015-03-16 20:55:51 -0400, MFPA wrote:
> 
>> Although I don't really like email addresses in the UIDs of my keys, I
>> quite like the simplicity of your "email address only" simplified UID
>> format. However, I would urge you to reconsider your decision to drop
>> the angle brackets. At least one MUA (the MUA I am using to write this
>> message) sends the email address enclosed in angle brackets as the
>> search string for GnuPG to locate the key. No angle brackets around
>> the email address means no key found.
> 
> This might be a bug (or at least a well-warranted feature enhancement)
> in GnuPG.
> 
> I've just opened https://bugs.g10code.com/gnupg/issue1927 to track it.

Great plan ... how does the shell know that the angle brackets are a
part of the GPG UID format?

If I run these commands currently:

gpg -k foo at example.org
gpg -k <foo at example.org>
gpg -k "foo at example.org"
gpg -k "<foo at example.org>"

The first, third and fourth all work, but the second complains, as it
rightly should, because bash uses < and > for other purposes,
specifically manipulating STDIN and STDOUT.  So I think you might find
it to be something that can't be fixed within GPG.  Instead the MUA
needs to either accept both formats (a bug in The Bat!) or enclose all
GPG key UIDs in quotation marks in order to mitigate that (a feature
request for The Bat!).


Regards,
Ben

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