Re: subkey selection

[Billy D. <bi...@da...>]

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On Sun, Jan 14, 2001 at 07:03:12AM -0600, Frank Tobin wrote:
> 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.

People keep bugging Werner for an alias feature in the .gnupg/options,
and he usually says that it should be handled outside of GnuPG
by wrappers.  One very very useful thing would be to encrypt
to a mailing list by selecting each of the list's subscribers
(obviously more useful for corporate mailing lists).
I actually need that sort of thing.  If I could translate

	pgpenvelope dev...@da...

to

	gpg -sea -r bi...@da... -r to...@da...\
		-r di...@da... -r ha...@da...

that would be cool.  Werner et al. say that that's what bash alias is for,
but that's only useful if you're using bash as the interpreter.
a MUA which does a direct execve of gpg (or pggenvelope, for that matter)
isn't going to be able to use bash's aliases.

As far as subkeys go, I never worry about them, and I don't really
understand them.
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