Re: Publickey subsystem draft posted

[Nicolas Williams <Nicolas.Williams%sun.com@localhost>]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2003 at 05:23:56PM -0600, Brent McClure wrote:
> >  3.4 Listing public keys
> > 
> >    If the client wishes to list the known public keys, the client sends:
> > 
> >    string    "list"
> > 
> >    The server will respond with zero or more of the following responses:
> > 
> >    string    "publickey"
> >    string    comment
> >    string    public-key algorithm name
> >    string    public-key blob
> > 
> >    The comment field contains user-specified text about the public key
> >    and MAY be empty.
> > 
> >    Following the last "publickey" response, a status packet MUST be
> >    sent.
> > 
> >    An implementation MAY choose not to support this request.
> > 
> > How long is the client supposed to wait for the server to send the
> > status packet to say it is done ?
> 
> On one hand I'd say that how long a client decides to wait could
> be implementation dependent. I suppose some implementations might
> simply hang until the status packet comes through assuming that 
> a user would cancel or interrupt the whole thing...
> 
> I see your point though. I believe one of the reasons we chose to 
> have a bunch of 'list' responses followed by a 'status' response
> was that we found it easy to parse.

If you want to keep to one packet per-listed key then you could add a
bit to the packet to indicate whether more are coming or not...

Cheers,

Nico
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