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Maniphest T4351

gpg --edit-key should improve selection of subkeys or user IDs
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Description

it's possible for an OpenPGP certificate to have many user IDs and many subkeys.

gpg --edit-key lets the user change settings or affect specific user IDs or specific subkeys, using key N or uid N subcommands.

Choosing N is often tricky to do when many user IDs or subkeys exist, or when the user wants to modify multiple user IDs or subkeys at once. Can we make this selection easier with --edit-key? I see three possible improvements (maybe they could all be done):

  • upon display in --edit-key, prefix each subkey and each user ID with a number, so that it's easy to choose N
  • allow selection of multiple items at once (e.g. key 1 2 3)
  • allow selection of subkey by subkey fingerprint, and selection of user ID by text (e.g. key 92E4764300AA6D7E87FC05F53BAD4F117215E775 or uid Alice Jones <alice@example.net>). for the UID selection, if combined with multiple selection, then i suppose we'd need to think about quoting.

Details

Version
2.2.12

Event Timeline

dkg created this task.Jan 28 2019, 10:10 PM
dkg added a comment.Jan 28 2019, 10:12 PM

for user ID selection, you could also potentially match on substring, so uid dkg could select/deselect all user IDs that contain "dkg".

I note that once you allow for picking multiple keys or uids, you have to consider the results of selecting a heterogenous group (i.e. where some were already selected *and* some were already unselected). in that case, i think you'd just toggle the selected state of all items, rather than trying to force them all into some specific shared position.

• werner triaged this task as Normal priority.Jan 29 2019, 11:02 AM
• werner added a subscriber: • werner.

Good idea.

matheusmoreira added a subscriber: matheusmoreira.May 9 2019, 8:20 PM