Robert, Thanks for the explantion of the new public key format. If I understand it correctly, the old system was like a flat file an this new one is more like an indexed database that allows faster lookups.
On 1/7/2020 12:37 AM, Robert J. Hansen wrote: >> I'm still a bit confused on the changes in secring. How does it come up >> with the names for those "new" keys as it doesn't seem to corrolate with >> anything I can see on the keys. > The names are actually keygrips, not fingerprints. > >> For them to go away from the OpenPGP standard it obviously had to make >> sense to them… > They didn't. RFC4880 doesn't define how to store certificates. > > Way back when, PGP Corporation stored its two keyrings as "pubring.pkr" > and "secring.skr". These two files were incredibly simple: each was > effectively an OpenPGP message containing nothing but a long sequence of > certificates. When PGP started it read each file into RAM, populated a > master keyring, and that was that. > > When GnuPG came along they decided to use the exact same format so that > people could migrate just by renaming their .pkr and .skr files to have > .gpg extensions. And this was likely a good decision, in that it made > it easy for people to switch from PGP. > > PGP is no longer a serious player in the OpenPGP space. Symantec bought > PGP years ago and seem to have been neglecting it ever since. > Consequentially, we no longer *need* to use old PGP formats to encourage > people to cross over. And at the same time, keyrings are getting a lot > bigger -- back in 2000 few people had more than a couple of dozen > certificates; twenty years later it's easy to have a few *hundred* > certificates. And the old, inefficient PGP keyring format doesn't work > very well any more. > > We don't need the PGP compatibility any more and it's holding us back. > That's the root reason for the changes. > > _______________________________________________ > Gnupg-users mailing list > Gnupg-users@gnupg.org > http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
