Re: Break backwards compatibility already: it’s time. Ignore the haters. I trust you.

[vedaal at nym.hush.com]

On 22/05/2018 02:16, Mauricio Tavares wrote:

      Stupid question: what is wrong with a "encrypt/decrypt old
format" flag/config option? If I have the need to use old stuff, I can
turn that on. All I see here is a "do not open old stuff" as a default
setting which should solve most issues.

...

There would be nothing wrong with that whatsoever from the perspective of users who need to access old encrypted data (e.g. archival access purposes), which is the particular use case I have been pointing out.

However, I don't think this would satisfy those who want to ensure that users cannot encrypt new data with legacy standards. In order to prevent users from doing this (which, to be clear, is something I agree with) there needs to be some way to make it difficult or impossible

=====

There is a simple solution that would satisfy everybody  ;-)

Keep an 'old' edition of GnuPG 1.4x for anyone who needs to decrypt 'old data', (or encrypt new data the 'old' way ...).

As one of the original die-hard pgp2.x users who still uses pgp (Disastry's 2.6.3 multi), I can comfortably say, that 2.x diehard users still use 2.x among themselves, and don't care about GnuPG.

The real issue is, that it's not easy to compile 2.x on newer systems, 
and people who have migrated to GnuPG on some remailer groups, still want to use their v3 keys, and need encrypting capability, 
which again would be solved by letting them use an 'old' version of 1.4.x, and as long as these versions are still being archived (which is reasonable for the forseeable future), they should have no problems.

So,

to put in a vote for RJH,

“Break backwards compatibility already: it’s time. Ignore the haters. I trust you.”


vedaal