Partial body length encoding for Compressed packets

[David Shaw]

On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 05:09:49PM -0500, Hasnain Mujtaba wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> I generated a PGP 2 style packet using GPG's --pgp2 option and tore it
> apart to look inside its structure. I found that both the encrypted and
> literal data packets are broken into RFC 2440 style partial body length
> chunks. But, as you explained, the compressed packet was indeterminate
> length encoded. 
> 
> I find this behavior perplexing. They made PGP 2 RFC2440 compliant only
> for encrypted and literal packets. But why not for compressed packets as
> well?

PGP 2 isn't RFC-2440 compliant.  PGP 2 dates from quite a few years
before 2440 was even written.

> Is this behavior found in PGP 5.x. PGP 6.x, and PGP 7.x as well, i.e RFC
> 2440 chunking for literal & encrypted packets, but indeterminate for
> compressed packets? Or will PGP 5.x and above, understand chunking for
> all three packets?
> 
> Not meaning to beat on a dead horse, but this forum is my only hope of
> staying sane in a world of interoperability minefields.

It won't work ;)

Sane PGP interoperability requires knowing when to give up.  For
example, there are details between PGP 5 and 7 where you can support
one or the other, but not both.

To a certain extent, supporting bugs from old versions that have been
replaced many times over is actually harmful.  I know that some users
have settled on one version of PGP and will continue to use that
version until the sun goes nova, but given the choice between
supporting that tiny minority of people, and the huge majority of
people who are using something actually RFC compliant, I know where
I'm going to spend my energy.

David