Re: [openpgp] keyserver protocol

["Daniel A. Nagy" <[e-mail]>]

On 05/07/2013 05:11 PM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> On Thu 2013-01-03 17:53:15 -0500, David Shaw wrote:
> 
>> I actually wrote this up at one point as an informational draft, but
>> for one reason or another didn't finish submitting it.  If there is
>> interest, I can clean it up and submit:
>>
>>   http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp-00.txt
> 
> David, i would like to see this picked back up if possible.  Is there a
> way that i can help?
> 
> In particular, I would like to see the error signalling and semantics be
> more clearly and explicitly defined, so that (for example) when a
> keyserver has a problem the user agents (e.g. client tools like gpg
> --refresh) have a clear way to distinguish between cases like:
> 
>  0) "I have no key material matching this name/keyid at all"
> 
>  1) "I have too many keys that match this search to bother you with an
>      insanely long list"
> 
>  2) "something is broken in my database, and I'm confused"

Also, I think that it makes sense to explicitly allow for partial
implementations of the protocol. For example, one that only allows for
searching by keyID's or even just long keyID's and fingerprints. I
think, there should be a clear way to communicate that the use of an
unsupported part of the protocol has been attempted.

Bests,

Daniel