[Help-gnutls] gnutls_openpgp_privkey_import() behavior seems inconsistent depending on choice of "format" variable

[Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos]

Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> On Thu 2008-04-03 13:48:37 -0400, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:
> 
>> This is not quite easy to fix since it depends on the internals of
>> opencdk. As far as I remember opencdk auto detects the input data
>> and acts accordingly. However in gnutls we specifically set the
>> raw/base64 flag. An improvement I could think would be to check the
>> data after the import in order to verify that import was successful.
>>
>> Does the attached patch solve the issue for you?
> 
> Thanks, Nikos.  That's certainly an improvement -- i now get
> GNUTLS_E_OPENPGP_GETKEY_FAILED when i try a privkey_import in RAW mode
> but the incoming datum is BASE64-encoded.  I think this patch should
> be applied to the master branch.

Thanks for trying. Applied.

> However, i don't get any failures when i set format to
> GNUTLS_OPENPGP_FMT_BASE64, whether the input is raw or not.  In fact,
> i can successfully import the key and use it regardless of the input
> format as long as i've set format this way.

This is not easy to fix and I'll leave it for now.

> So: why bother with this parameter to privkey_import, since one
> setting (FMT_BASE64) works no matter what kind of input you've got?
> Why would anyone choose FMT_RAW?

It is cleaner to specify what you want to import. The future API might 
not autodetect the input data.

> The inconsistency between format flags is confusing and unpredictable
> From the docs; and unpredictability is a property that's undesirable
> in a library, no?

The flags should be used as documented. The functionality to being able 
to import raw when specified base64 is not documented and might be 
removed at future versions.

regards,
Nikos