Mailing List Archive

gnupg-gdbm keyring hangs when importing keys
Hi!

My public keyring is growing and so I'm thinking about using the
feature to use a GDBM keyring with gpg. The man page tells me:

--keyring file
Add file to the list of keyrings. If file
begins with a tilde and a slash, these are
replaced by the HOME directory. If the filename
does not contain a slash, it is assumed to be in
the home-directory ("~/.gnupg" if --homedir is
not used). The filename may be prefixed with a
scheme:

"gnupg-ring:" is the default one.

"gnupg-gdbm:" may be used for a GDBM ring.

It might make sense to use it together with
--no-default-keyring.

So I exported the trustdb and ~/.gnupg/pubring.gpg away, and changed
the options file to mention only one public keyring:

keyring gnupg-gdbm:pubring.gpg

After this I tried to import the old key ring using gpg --import or
gpg --fast-import, but both commands hang (= consume CPU time, but
seem to do nothing) after importing one or two keys. Starting it with
-v doesn't help much:

$ gpg --import -v ../.gnupg.old/pubring.gpg
gpg: pub 1024D/BD8B050D 1999-06-05 Roland Rosenfeld <roland@spinnaker.de>
gpg: key BD8B050D: no subkey for key binding
gpg: key BD8B050D: public key imported
gpg: /home/roland/.gnupg/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created
[time passes until I press Ctrl-C]
gpg: Interrupt caught ... exiting

So I added --debug-all to the options, which gives me 3817 lines of
output. Then the debug output stops but gpg still consumes CPU time.
The last lines of the debug output are:

gpg: DBG: parse_packet(iob=14): type=2 length=70 (parse.ringedit.c.1768)
gpg: DBG: mpi_alloc(160)
gpg: DBG: mpi_alloc_limb_space(160)
gpg: DBG: mpi_alloc(160)
gpg: DBG: mpi_alloc_limb_space(160)
gpg: DBG: iobuf-14.0: close `(null)'

I don't see what happens here. Long time ago (when the gnupg-gdbm
feature was freshly implemented) I also tried this and it worked. But
because of the fact, that it wasn't able to remove keys from a gdbm
ring, I stopped using it in the past. Is this feature no longer
available or am I missing something?

Is there someone else who uses gnupg-gdbm and is this usable?

Ciao

Roland

--
* roland@spinnaker.de * http://www.spinnaker.de/ *
PGP: 1024/DD08DD6D 2D E7 CC DE D5 8D 78 BE 3C A0 A4 F1 4B 09 CE AF
Re: gnupg-gdbm keyring hangs when importing keys [ In reply to ]
Roland Rosenfeld <roland@spinnaker.de> writes:

> My public keyring is growing and so I'm thinking about using the
> feature to use a GDBM keyring with gpg. The man page tells me:

Did I forgot to tell that GDBM support is experimental? Seems to be a
man page bug. We will have a faster way to store keys, but because
the day has only 24 hours ...



--
Werner Koch at guug.de www.gnupg.org keyid 621CC013