This works insofar that it is now possible to set "none" (via the registry in VSD):

The most difficult thing here was to actually support the case where the user then sees the keyresolver dialog and selects "yes i do not wish to sign" this never worked.

Now when I try to encrypt to expired certificate this message comes up:

So the default error is now:

Btw. if the keyserver is set to "none" or whatever the new value is worded we should remove all the publishing options from the UI. But that is a different issue, I just noticed this while talking about this ticket.

this works now:

@ebo: I just a did a test build: gnupg-vs-desktop-3.2.0-beta178-x86_64.AppImage in my directory

I misunderstood the issue. When I created the GnuPG VS-Desktop package I did not wrote a qt.conf file which thanks to our patch https://dev.gnupg.org/source/gpg4win/browse/master/patches/qtbase/0001-Gpg4win-qstandardpaths-patch.patch caused all config files for Gpg4win to be placed under %APPDATA%\kleopatra. This was by accident since it uses NSIS FileWrite and FileWrite is not supported in our NSIS to MSI packaging.

BTW, with one of the recent gpgme fixes we now get

$~/b/gpgme/tests/run-keylist  --extern --verbose foo
run-keylist: file /home/wk/s/gpgme/tests/run-keylist.c line 414: <Dirmngr> No keyserver available

which is what users (and kleopatra) expects.

Note that for vsd we also need to change our default configuration file. The new "none" value provides a better error message than the old default of assuming that the AD carries the keyserver (which it does not in practise).

I think that might have been some idea we had before we added --require-compliance and proper display of non compliant signatures in KMail and Kleopatra and wanted to ensure that non compliant signatures are not "Green".
But since this is not a regression we might even consider not changing this in 2.2 anymore but instead do some relaxation how we treat non compliant signatures both for creation and verification in 2.4 I see T6644 as related.

I do not agree that this will help much, but I am all for changing the string "Find more info on Wikipedia" into something like "See the Quickguide for a short introduction".