The man page also needs to be updated (or reference) whats-new-in-2.1 ,especially the New format for key listings. The "missing" KeyIDs in the listing is extremely confusing to someone used to the old system. I wasted much time trying to discover what I was missing.

OK. Designated box wasn't a technical term, so obvious in retrospect.

Despite my previous denial, I now think that you are correct: I now think that I did indeed follow a Debian wiki entry on separating the primary key. In my defense it was many years ago :-(. I have now managed to import a primary key, although unfortunately the wrong one.

Just to note that I did import the secret key, but there was no change. I have searched for the term designated box, but I found no hits. Where is this term defined or explained?

Thanks for the prompt reply. I did not explicitly move the primary key offline. Maybe there is something in the default debian configuration that does that?
$GNUPGHOME is pointing to a .gnupg which contains secring.gpg and also a directory private-keys-v1.d/ which contains two keys.

I should have added, in case it wasn't obvious, that I changed some ids etc in the report just to protect precise details.