[Pkg-gnupg-maint] Bug#500953: Figured out

[Filipus Klutiero]

retitle 500953 gpg --search-keys foo --keyserver bar returns no keys due to 
argument order
tags 500953 + upstream
thanks

Le October 2, 2008 10:01:43 pm Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer, vous avez 
écrit :
> reassign 500953 gnupg 1.4.9-3
> thanks
>
> On Thursday 02 October 2008 19:12:33 Filipus Klutiero wrote:
> > Package: kgpg
> > Version: 4:3.5.9-2
> > Severity: normal
> >
> > On some servers, KGpg seems to find 0 keys. For example, I can find
> > several keys for search string "Douville" on "hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net",
> > but searching on "hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net (Default)" (see #427404) finds
> > no key after a long search time. Searching for "John" on
> > hkp://wwwkeys.pgp.net also yields no results, after a long time.
>
> Works fine with 4:3.5.10-1, but I don't know if that will get into Lenny
> :-( Anyway, the problem could be in another place.
>
> > Note that I'm not familiar with GnuPG. I seem to be unable to search
> > using the command line.
>
> Strange enough, in my KDE 4 box,
>
> l at luna:~$ gpg --keyserver hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net --search-keys Douville
> gpg: searching for "Douville" from hkp server wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net
> gpg: key "Douville" not found on keyserver
>
> does the same that you describe, but
>
> gpg --keyserver hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net --search-keys Douville
>
> works.
What do you mean? Are these two commands not identical?

While looking a bit more I figured out the problems. Plural, because there are 
3 problems in 3 systems.

First,
gpg --keyserver hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net --search-keys Douville
always fails, while
gpg --search-keys Douville --keyserver hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net
works. This is the gnupg bug which this report will from now on be about.

In my initial report, I wrote that I could find keys 
on "hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net" but not on "hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net 
(Default)". This was wrong; I hadn't tested enough times. I can find keys on 
both, and both fail sometimes. The problem is that wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net is a 
round-robin to 2 servers, one of which timeouts. Same idea with 
wwwkeys.pgp.net which switchs between about 10 servers, about half of which 
timeout or fail. So the second problem is on pgp.net's side.

The third problem is that KGpg does not handle timeouts properly, reporting no 
timeout but simply "Found 0 matching keys". I reported this upstream as 
#172063.