[openpgp] "OpenPGP Simple"

[David Shaw]

On Mar 17, 2015, at 7:18 AM, Werner Koch <wk at gnupg.org> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 16 Mar 2015 22:30, dshaw at jabberwocky.com said:
> 
>> A partial length is needed to handle content as a stream - say some program that generates gigabytes of data (like a backup).  Something large enough that you really don't want to have to buffer the whole thing before encrypting it.
> 
> And to support > 4GiB files on systems without LFS support.

Right, good point.  I think it's safe to say there are enough uses for partial length / streaming that it should be kept.  Not all the world is email.

What if the encoding was really simple - something like 4 bytes always, and the leftmost bit would mean "partial".  So any packet 2^31 or less could be encoded in one piece, but we could still do partial for those situations that needed it.  We could have any number of partial lengths, but it would always end with a non-partial final length.

David