What are those keys about?

Question
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After I had no problems installing Pijul (:+1:), troubles started for me when I started to use Pijul just a few minutes ago. I ran pijul init, which seemed to work fine, but my first pijul record failed with a reference to keys.

Now I have no real clue what kind of keys these are. Are they for author identification and signing patches or for logging in somewhere? I would think it should be the former, but then pijul key generate has a “login” as a mandatory option, which I guess is meant to be some sort of user name for logging in somewhere. But where? Pijul should be usable just locally or in connection with an arbitrary hosting provider and even many of them for the same repository.

Also, what kind of key will be generated? GPG? SSH? SSL? Can I reuse an already existing key, for example my key for SSH logins?

Sadly, the in-tool help is quite rudimentary and the manual doesn’t seem to talk about keys at all. And with no clarity on this subject I cannot go on using Pijul and now have to manually store the different versions of my file with extensions such as .1, .2, etc. in order to create the proper Pijul history later. :slightly_frowning_face: Therefore, I’d be happy to receive some clarification soon.

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Hey! This sounds almost identical to what I said here:
#521 Can’t get a new repo going
I still think it’s a code problem, not a documentation problem.

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Thanks for the pointer. Unfortunately, I don’t have an account on the Nest and don’t want to create one at this point; so I can’t continue discussing this issue there. Maybe some of the experts (@pmeunier perhaps) want to chime in here?

While I think I kind of understand Pijul’s use of keys meanwhile, I want to point out that it’s very misleading and actually wrong to talk about a “login”. At least from what I get from the manual text linked from that Nest discussion (which apparently hasn’t made it into the manual on the website) is that this name has nothing to do with logging in somewhere but is just a name the user assigns to himself. The linked manual text actually talks about a name, not a login, but the tool doesn’t.

My follow-up question would be if that name may include spaces and thus can be my real name. I could also use a shorthand, similar to a user name, of course, but this would seem suboptimal to me, because, while I’m using a single user name almost everywhere, there are sites where I use alternative user names; so there’s no unique “user name” of mine.

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