subkey selection

[Frank T. <ft...@ui...>]

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I've been working on getting subkey selection for encryption into
pgpenvelope, and have to decide on a couple interface issues.

First, if you select a key to encrypt to which has multiple subkeys,
should you be immediately prompted to select a subkey?  Or should you
just, as another menu option, be able to select the subkey to use for a
specifc public key you've already selected to use?

Personally, I'm getting the feeling that having multiple subkeys was a bad
idea in OpenPGP.  It causes too much confusion among users, and could
easily just be replaced by having multiple primary keys, all signed by a
separate signing key.

On a side note, is there interest in having a wrapper around GnuPG that
allows you to do things like have aliases for keys, and set "defaults"
such as which subkeys to use during encryption?  E.g., you would call
GnuPG to encrypt to your key ABCD, but then the wrapper would look up ABCD
in it's configuration, and substitute the desired subkey?

If this sort of thing might be interesting, please give me ideas for other
wrapper functionality that might be useful.  This is all sort of stuff
that 'could' be in GnuPG, but would probably best be handled currently by
a wrapper program.

- -- 
Frank Tobin		http://www.uiuc.edu/~ftobin/
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