fingerprint of key

[Duane Whitty]

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On 17-08-14 05:58 PM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> On Mon 2017-08-14 13:25:58 -0300, Duane Whitty wrote:
>> Thanks for your response.  So, what you are saying is that the
>> man page is wrong ;-)
> 
> I didn't think that was what i was saying, but there have certainly
> been bugs in the documentation in the past.  Is there specific text
> that you think is wrong?  do you have a suggestion about what it
> should be changed to?
> 
> --dkg
> 
The situation is a little more clear since your last response.  If I
may quote you:

"the trouble with these two invocations of gpg is that they offer no
command.  Each invocation of GnuPG is supposed to include exactly one
command and zero or more options. ..."

I ran gpg2 --with-fingerprint oracle_vbox.asc which did what I wanted
and I received no complaints.
I did not and still do not want to import the oracle_vbox public key
into my key ring.  I am happy to download it and check it each time.
When I looked at the man page for how to do this it looked like gpg2
- --fingerprint oracle_vbox.asc should do the job but as you have
pointed out gpg expects a key in my keyring to perform that action on.

After reading the man page several times for the 1.4 and 2.0 versions
I can see nothing that would make me believe that I needed to provide
the program with a key from my keyring.  That's fine though, I'm still
learning.

Now that you point it out I can see that --with-fingerprint is an
option under the section "Key related options" and so it makes sense
that a command should be entered as well.

I am not sure I understand why it would be bad to do the following,
which implies not importing the key to a keyring:

gpg --with-fingerprint --fingerprint < public-key-file.asc

where I substituted --fingerprint for --import

However if I do that it's the same as running:
gpg2 --with-fingerprint --fingerprint

and the oracle_vbox.asc file containing the key is completely ignored
and there are no warnings that it was ignored.

Before I go down the road on offering an opinion on how the man page
should be "fixed" (maybe it's not really broken) can you explain why
it would be bad to let gpg generate and display the fingerprint of a
key in an ascii armoured file?

By the way, I really appreciate the assistance you're giving me in
helping me to understand this.  I know your busy.

Best Regards,
Duane

- -- 
Duane Whitty
duane at nofroth.com
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