Partial body length encoding for Compressed packets

[David Shaw]

On Sat, Aug 07, 2004 at 06:11:59PM -0400, Hasnain Mujtaba wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I am working with RFC2440 partial body length (PBL) encoding for my app.
> I have noticed that even though GPG's Encrypted Data Packets are cut
> into partial body length (PBL) chunks, the enclosed Compressed Data
> Packets are encoded using indeterminate lengths, rather than PBLs. Is
> this the default behavior for GPG and if so for what reasons?
> 
> If possible, I would like GPG to create both compressed data packets and
> enclosed literal data packets using PBL encoding. Is there some way to
> force enable this feature?

For PGP 2 compatibility reasons, GnuPG uses indeterminate lengths for
compressed packets.  There is no way to change this, but if you are
willing to compile a special GnuPG to test with, you can do something
like setting "new_ctb" to 1 in build_packet() when generating a
compressed data packet.

David