[Pkg-privacy-maintainers] Bug#836266: Bug#836266: Bug#836266: dirmngr: Please disable "use-tor" by default.

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Tue 2016-12-06 10:34:26 -0500, intrigeri wrote:
> Now, I have to admit that the currently resulting UX is sometimes
> painful. In the past few months I often had to ask dirmngr to forget
> that it thought my configured keyserver was down, otherwise it would
> simply not even try, although my network connectivity + Tor client
> were up again. But I did not notice any such problem recently, which
> makes my life easier again. I suspect that dirmngr was recently
> improved in this respect.

I concur with intrigeri that this is not a problem that should be fixed
in parcimonie.

dirmngr has a range of problems right now with its understanding of
which hosts are alive and dead.  I've been reporting them upstream, some
of them have been fixed, and some haven't yet.

For example:

   https://bugs.gnupg.org/gnupg/issue2438

some of them interact with tor, some interact with hkps, and others are
simply problems with lower-level DNS apis, etc.

avoiding the use of tor for parcimonie seems like it would (a) not solve
the underlying problems, and (b) be more likely to expose users to
network surveillance.

       --dkg