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NAME

       jetring - maintenance of gpg keyrings using changesets

OVERVIEW

       jetring  is  a  collection  of  tools that allow for gpg keyrings to be
       maintained using changesets. It was developed with the  Debian  keyring
       in  mind,  and aims to solve the problem that a gpg keyring is a binary
       blob that’s hard for multiple people to collaboratively edit.

       With jetring, changesets can be submitted, reviewed to see exactly what
       they will do, applied, and used to build a keyring. The origin of every
       change  made  to  the  keyring  is  available  for  auditing,  and  gpg
       signatures can be used to further secure things.

OPERATION

       A  jetring  directory  is  used as the "source" that a keyring is built
       from.  To convert an existing gpg keyring to such a directory, use  the
       jetring-explode(1) command.

       Each  change  to the gpg keyring is stored in a separate changeset file
       in the directory. Changesets can reflect any  set  of  changes  to  the
       keyring.   Changesets can also include arbitrary metadata. The jetring-
       gen(1) command can be used to  compare  two  keyrings  and  generate  a
       changeset from one to the other.

       Changesets  are  never  removed or modified, only new ones added, using
       the jetring-accept(1) command.

       There’s an ordering of the changesets. This ordering is  stored  in  an
       index  file. The index file is only appended to, to add new changesets.

       Changesets can be fully examined to see what change  they  make  before
       applying  them.  The jetring-review(1) and jetring-diff(1) commands can
       be used for such review.

       To create a new keyring, or incrementally update an  existing  keyring,
       changesets are applied in order using the jetring-build(1) command.

GPG SIGNATURES

       The  index  file  can  optionally  be gpg signed (the signature will be
       stored in index.gpg); if JETRING_SIGN is set to point to a gpg keyring,
       then jetring commands that operate on the jetring directory will always
       check that the index file is signed with one  of  the  keys  from  that
       keyring. Commands that modify the index file will update its signature.

CHANGESET FORMAT

       A changeset file consists of one or more stanzas,  separated  by  blank
       lines.   The  stanzas are in RFC-822-like format. Each stanza must have
       an action field, which specifies which action to take on  the  keyring,
       and a data field, typically a multi-line field, which contains the data
       to feed to the action. Supported actions are:

       import The data field should be an ascii-armored gpg key block, that is
              fed into gpg --import.

       edit-key keyid
              gpg --edit-key is run on the specified key id. The data field is
              a script, each line in it is passed in to gpg, the  same  as  if
              gpg  were  being  driven interactively. This can be used to make
              arbitrary changes to the key.

       delete-key keyid
              The given key is deleted. The data is fed into gpg --delete-key,
              and  should  be  "y",  since  gpg  expects  that confirmation to
              deleting a key.

       Other fields can be added as desired to hold metadata about the change.
       Typical additional fields include date, changed-by, and comment.

       Changesets  can  be  optionally have attached signatures, although such
       data is not automatically validated and is mostly useful to record  who
       submitted or signed off on a given changeset.

AUTHOR

       Joey Hess, <joey@kitenet.net>.