8bit mime support? (linked to thunderbird issue)

[Robert J. Hansen]

> don´t care if some stupid software have bandwidth to loose...

The cold reality is there exists antique software and obsolete 
workflows, and the moment new software starts breaking them do you know 
who gets blamed? The new software's maintainer who is doing things the 
right way.

PGP 2.6 dates from 1991, has been obsolete for 30 years at this point, 
has long been eclipsed by multiple generations of newer standards 
(RFC2440, RFC2440bis, RFC4880, RFC4880bis, now LibrePGP), but GnuPG 
still supports it because whenever Werner even makes noise about ending 
PGP 2.6 support there's a sea of people screaming.

RFCs 2015 and 3156 are *the only* standards for using OpenPGP in email: 
inline-PGP was never a standard and always had deep faults. But as the 
former FAQ maintainer, let me tell you the most obnoxious emails I 
received were from people outraged the FAQ changed to officially bless 
RFC-conformant emails and advise against inline-PGP.

And this was over a *documentation change*.

I'm glad your software and workflow supports the latest and greatest. I 
really am. I wish more people did.

But they don't, and that's why maintainers have to support old and 
broken behaviors, even at the cost of some bandwidth.

> so why do we still ENFORCE 7bit ascii for something that is no-where 
> more used? do you know a single 7bit CPU still there?????

For quite some time PGP-Basics, a Yahoo! Groups mailing list devoted to 
helping newbies learn OpenPGP, could not support PGP/MIME because Y!Gs 
mailing list software insisted on munging text attachments. So yeah, old 
and broken things still exist everywhere.

> base64, 7bit ascii, EBDICT, base32... quoted printable... are just 
> oldies... they had their use, they are now just no more needed and 
> belongs to history... you still use the old 5"1/4 floppy disk?

Friend, the United States nuclear arsenal runs on 8" floppies.

No, I'm not kidding.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 236 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-devel/attachments/20250729/d9169ba8/attachment.sig>