[Pkg-gnupg-maint] Bug#501630: gnupg: breaks symlink for secret keyring

[Peter Palfrader]

On Wed, 08 Oct 2008, Ian Zimmerman wrote:

> The GNU Privacy Handbook says:
> 
>         Safely storing your private key is important, but there is a cost.
>         Ideally, you would keep the private key on a removable, write-protected
>         disk such as a floppy disk, and you would use it on a single-user
>         machine not connected to a network.
> 
> However, it turns out gpg makes following this advice hard.  If ~/.gnupg/secring.gpg
> is a symlink (in my case, to a file on a USB fob), and the keyring changes
> (for example, deleting a public-private key pair), gpg breaks the symlink and creates
> a new file where the symlink was, instead of modifying the target of the symlink.

That's probably a side-effect of safely updating keyrings:  write to a
temporary file, then move the now consistent new keyring in its proper
place.  If you want to have your secret keyring some place else you
should use the --secret-keyring option (or "secret-keyring" in your gpg
config file).

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