Error message "buffer shorter than subpacket" when touching my keyring

[Oliver Klee]

Binary package hint: gnupg

In my GPG keyring, I have 312 keys (including mine) and 71350 signatures. I regularly do a "--refresh-keys" to download new signatures.

For the last few days, I get the following error message (or warning) when doing anything with my keyring:

gpg: buffer shorter than subpacket
gpg: buffer shorter than subpacket
gpg: signature packet without keyid
gpg: buffer shorter than subpacket

(I refer to these four lines as "message block" further down.)

When doing gpg --rebuild-keydb-caches, I get this message block once.

When doing gpg --check-trustdb, I get this message block 6 times.

When doing gpg --refresh-keys, I get this message 10 times: Once at the beginning and 9 times at the end of the process.

I'm not really sure whether this really is a bug in gnupg or just a malformed key (and if so, how I can find out which key it is).

[Oliver Klee (launchpad-oliverklee)]

Oh, this is on Dapper i386 with current updates. I'm running kgpg in the background.

[Oliver Klee (launchpad-oliverklee)]

I've just purged my keyring of revoked/expired keys and of keys which I don't trust (yet). With these keys removed, the message disappears. I've backuped the old version of the keyring and of the trustdb so I'm able to reproduce the problem if needed.

[Oliver Klee (launchpad-oliverklee)]

This also causes bug 52113 (in PSI).

[Jérôme Guelfucci (jerome-guelfucci-deactivatedaccount)]

Thank you for your bug report. Do you still have this issue with the latest release of Ubuntu ?

[Oliver Klee (launchpad-oliverklee)]

No, the problem seems to have disappeared with Feisty.

[Jérôme Guelfucci (jerome-guelfucci-deactivatedaccount)]

Ok, I'm marking this as fixed.