#974670 lintian-brush: "Re-export upstream signing key without extra signatures" is not optimal

Package:
lintian-brush
Source:
lintian-brush
Description:
automatically fix lintian problems
Submitter:
Xavier Guimard
Date:
2025-12-15 11:23:03 UTC
Severity:
normal
Tags:
#974670#5
Date:
2020-11-13 15:42:57 UTC
From:
To:
Hi,

when launching lintian-brush in apache2 source directories, it says that
upstream signing key were optimized but I still have:

  public-upstream-key-not-minimal upstream/signing-key.asc has 2 extra signature(s) for keyid 193F180AB55D9977
  public-upstream-key-not-minimal upstream/signing-key.asc has 283 extra signature(s) for keyid 7D6DBFD1F08E012A
  public-upstream-key-not-minimal upstream/signing-key.asc has 63 extra signature(s) for keyid 8B3A601F08C975E5

Cheers and thanks for this tool !
#974670#10
Date:
2020-11-18 02:02:54 UTC
From:
To:
tags 974670 +confirmed
thanks

Thanks for the report. I can confirm it here. It's a little bit
surprising since I think we're specifying the right flags
(import-minimal):

  import-minimal
      Import the smallest key possible. This removes all signatures
      except the most recent self-signature on each user ID. This
      option is the same as running the --edit-key command "minimize"
      after import.  Defaults to no.

Jelmer
#974670#21
Date:
2025-12-15 11:15:37 UTC
From:
To:
reassign 974670 lintian
thanks

So this keyring is a bit special because a lot of the data uses an ancient PGP message format (< v4).

I suspect that the way lintian works it incorrectly detects that there are changes necessary here because it reserializes the keys into a modern format.