On Fri, Aug 24, 2001 at 12:06:09AM -0400, Michael Young wrote:
The description of the "Primary User ID" subpacket says:
If more than one user id in a key is marked as primary, the
implementation may resolve the ambiguity in any way it sees fit.
It seems that the most likely reason for a second "primary"
is that it has been updated. If so, it seems that one should
defer to the most recent valid signature. Can we say
that an implementation "SHOULD" do that, rather than leaving
it open?
The draft does say "...an implementation SHOULD allow the user to
rewrite the self-signature, and important information in it, such as
preferences and key expiration", which implies that the implementation
should be able to rewrite the self-signatures to remove the primary
subpacket from one and place it onto the other.
That said, there is certainly going to be an implementation that just
merges things together so there is more than one self-signature on a
given user ID. The keyservers do this now, I believe.
Perhaps (in addition to what you suggest), it would be good to include
language that suggests that in cases of multiple self-signatures on a
single user ID, the most recent should be followed.
David
--
David Shaw | dshaw(_at_)jabberwocky(_dot_)com | WWW
http://www.jabberwocky.com/
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