[openpgp] "OpenPGP Simple"

[Werner Koch]

On Mon, 16 Mar 2015 22:15, coruus at gmail.com said:

> Is there an option to completely disable this? Relatedly, is there any
> option to not use new-format partial lengths?

No.  In fact I started with GnuPG before OpenPGP and one of the first
additions to the RFC-1991 PGP-2 format was my own version of partial
lengths.  This has been removed in favor of the OpenPGP and PGP-5
partial length format.  

You really really want partial length.  A major problem with PGP-2 was
that it required large temporary files for certain operations - you
can't do backups this way.

Up until DKIM all Internet protocols have been carefully designed to
allow streaming of data (ie. the Unix way) and the IETF should continue
to stress the importance of this.

> Partial lengths are really a nuisance to parse.

Yeah the OpenPGP encoding is a bit over-engineered to save octets.  But
even its partial format is easier to implement than the HTTP
counterpart.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner

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