On 6/26/21, Andrei POPESCU <andreimpope...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Andrei, thanks for having picked up my problem and having cared for the >> release notes to comment on it, and also for supposedly having motivated >> Julian Andres Klose to publish a very helpful blog post on the related >> subject. Brad Rogers here in the thread linked to it in his answer to me, >> thanks also for this. >> Darac Marjal in his answer made me understood, that my problem was NOT >> about >> knowing how to copy a key file to a directory, but about being convinced >> that it is allowed to simply copy files to the /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/ >> sub-directory without having to manage this by a special tool like gpg. >> For >> convincing me, maybe the man page of apt-key was simply missing a word >> like >> "manually" for expressing to "manually place files in this sub-director". >> As >> a beginner being confronted with security relevant procedures, specially >> when it is about things like PGP keys based on a Web Of Trust concept, >> you >> easily suspect that a special security tool would exist for ensuring that >> handling the important package signature key infrastructure is done >> correctly. Obviously not. Simply copying a key there appears is really >> enough to get access to a repository. > > Well, it makes perfect sense if you remember that "everything is a > file", even if there are exceptions (e.g. network devices).
Hopefully I'm reading this right. While on dialup, I spent A LOT of time battling a well-known closed source modem tty* driver. Out of desperation, I could sometimes get it to work by copying it between hard drives that contained separate operating systems. BUT you can't just e.g. "cp" or "right click > copy" it over. It would fail with a "Can't copy special file" error message. I know this because I just did it again with ttyS0. You CAN rsync it between partitions, and it would be viable, usable. > Documentation for actions requiring specialized tools is rather of the > form "use foo to add an entry to baz", e.g. in the context of GnuPG it > would be "use gpg to add this public key to <keyring>" (which is also a > file, but must be manipulated with specialized tools). Cindy :) -- Cindy-Sue Causey Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA * runs with birdseed *