PGP & GPG compatibility

[Werner Koch]

On Tue, 15 Jan 2002 17:25:15 -0800, Will Price said:

> above is as well. That's like saying, "have you stopped beating your
> wife?" I would encourage some objectivity on that.

Huh?  Go to the gnupg-users lists archive and search for PGP problems.
You will notice a couple of reports wrt PGP 7.0.3 - this is what I
have described.  I have not the time to dig out the messages for you
as too much of my time is already spend to cope with all those little
PGP bugs.  It is really an annoying job which does not get easier by
the "verbosity" of PGP's error messages ;-)

>> At least they still don't understand version 4 signatures on data
>> packets (only on keys).  I had in mind that this was fixed some
>> time ago, but obviously this isn't the case.

> I'm fairly sure we support that in 7.1.0 and up.

According to Len this was indeed fixed in 7.0 but it seems that it was
dropped in later versions.  I have not seen any message from 7.1.

> That's not the only problem with text mode signatures. International
> characters present an even larger challenge. Most of this is not

RFC2440 - 5.9. Literal Data Packet (Tag 11)

   A Literal Data packet contains the body of a message; data that is
   not to be further interpreted.

So there are no conversion issues here.  Unless textmode is used -
which IMHO should be dropped entirely for clearness of protocol
layering.  But we should not discuss it here.

> don't handle it well either. Going forward, UTF8 migration is likely
> to cause some growing pains for everybody.

Not unlikely for Windows or KDE who are using UCS-2.

> It is a mystery to us as well what happened with that... We were
> ready to proceed, but we were not the organizer so it was out of our

My feeling is that the proprietary vendors are not interested in
OpenPGP due to the fact that S/MIME does better feed the PKI cash cow.
Well the trademark PGP is a different story and probably good to sell
other products.

Ciao,

  Werner

-- 
Werner Koch        Omnis enim res, quae dando non deficit, dum habetur
g10 Code GmbH      et non datur, nondum habetur, quomodo habenda est.
Privacy Solutions                                        -- Augustinus




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