I've been using GPG for a few years and my entry at the various directories, such as the Ubuntu's keyserver, is now pretty messy:
uid Andy McCall (Andy McCall's PGP Key) <[email protected]>
sig sig 0463e8da7a2779b7 2021-12-19T12:26:56Z 2026-12-18T11:39:55Z ____________________ [selfsig]
sig sig 0463e8da7a2779b7 2018-06-05T13:47:23Z 2020-03-21T21:31:35Z ____________________ [selfsig]
sig sig 0463e8da7a2779b7 2017-07-20T19:12:35Z 2020-03-21T21:31:35Z ____________________ [selfsig]
sig sig 9710b89bca57ad7c 2019-05-29T12:00:24Z 2019-06-12T12:00:24Z ____________________ 9710b89bca57ad7c
sig sig 9710b89bca57ad7c 2019-06-11T12:00:55Z 2019-06-25T12:00:55Z ____________________ 9710b89bca57ad7c
sig sig 9710b89bca57ad7c 2019-06-25T00:00:51Z 2019-07-09T00:00:51Z ____________________ 9710b89bca57ad7c
sig sig 9710b89bca57ad7c 2019-07-08T12:00:55Z 2019-07-22T12:00:55Z ____________________ 9710b89bca57ad7c
sig sig 9710b89bca57ad7c 2019-09-14T00:00:37Z 2019-09-28T00:00:37Z ____________________ 9710b89bca57ad7c
Is it possible to remove some of the earlier entries? For example, I really only need the following entry:
uid Andy McCall (Andy McCall's PGP Key) <[email protected]>
sig sig 0463e8da7a2779b7 2021-12-19T12:26:56Z 2026-12-18T11:39:55Z ____________________ [selfsig]
I've have access to my private key, but the specific gpg keychain that some of the earlier entries were made on has been lost.
It's common thing to keep history of all the key self-signatures, since they prove what was happening with a key in a certain point in time - i.e. it was valid for a year in 2019, then re-certified in 2020 to extend lifespan and so on. For instance if you generated a signature with that key in 2019, with the single 2021-2026 entry it would not be possible to tell that signature was valid in 2019.