"L. Sassaman" <rabbi(_at_)quickie(_dot_)net> writes:
It's not just aesthetics. This issue was brought up by Marc Horowitz at
the Keyserver Symposium this week. He thinks that it could have a positive
impact on the internal workings of the keyservers, and would simplfy
seaches for the user.
I think Len is putting words in my mouth. I do have some ideas which
came out of the meeting for changes which would have a positive impact
on the internal workings of the keyservers, and on the externally
visible functioning of the network as a whole, but changing how keyids
are generated and interpreted isn't one of them.
To address Phil's concerns as described by Hal, there's no reason that
you couldn't use the variable rightmost N bits of the fingerprint to
identify a key with arbitrary specificity today. For people's
keyrings, the linear search won't take any more or less time. For the
keyserver, if people wanted this feature, it would be possible to
start keeping an index of the fingerprint in reverse bit order.
Changes would be necessary in the keyserver to support lookup by
anything but a fixed position+length of the fingerprint, anyway. This
isn't pretty, but it would be complexity hidden from the user.
I agree with everyone else that using the leftmost N bits would have
been prettier, but isn't strictly necessary.
Marc