[Sks-devel] Re: New search options question (Was: Query UI which offers ...)

[Phil Pennock]

On 2010-12-28 at 09:42 +0100, Gabor Kiss wrote:
> > The server query interface at http://sks.spodhuis.org/ now automatically
> > adds a new list drop-down, if JavaScript is enabled in your browser,
> > letting you choose any server in the SKS mesh to query against.  No
> > JavaScript, no list of alternative servers, and the UI degrades down
> > cleanly.
> 
> I checked sks.spodhuis.org and I'm interested in search options
> - "Restrict to Exact matches",
> - "Clean results disable" and
> - "Machine-readable"
> rather than JS. :-)
> 
> These are new to me and I guess they are version 1.1.1 specific.
> I wonder what the first two do? I could not see any difference
> in the results.
> Browsing source does not help me, I'm dummy to OCAML. :-)
> 
> And where did you get your index.html from?
> Source tarball nor contains it neither instructs you how to create.
> Had you a vision? :)))

None of those options are new in 1.1.1.  I found them by browsing the
SKS source-code, back around the time that I set up my keyserver.

I wrote the web-page from scratch, after looking at some other pages but
not being able to find copyright info and deciding that I'd rather write
something clean in modern HTML and explore the source to make sure I got
*all* the options.

The unhelpful answer is that the first two items will set "exact" to
true and "clean" to false in the generated "request"-type object.  That
there was a knob was enough for me to want to twist it to see what
happens.  :)

More helpfully: if the "clean" CGI param is set false, then a filter
will not be applied to the keys when trying to find results; that filter
drops bad sigs and, I *think* drops missing self-sigs, but I'm not sure.

I don't think that the "exact" option is actually used.  It sets a field
but that's never referenced.  It might be used at some point.

The specification for the various fields used in the PKS protocol is at:
  http://www.mit.edu/afs/net.mit.edu/project/pks/thesis/paper/thesis.html

Heh.  "Today's key servers manage over twenty thousand public keys";
compare to the almost 2.9 million keys in an SKS keyserver at the time
that I write this.  :)

-Phil