On Mon, 20 Oct 1997, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
At 07:29 PM 10/20/97 -0500, William H. Geiger III wrote:
There is no need to modify the MIME toolkit or at least none above what
must be already done to accommodate incorporating PGP/MIME types. The
ascii armor encoding is handled by PGP and would be included in any PGP
toolkit a programmer may be using.
I don't understand why you think that everyone will use a PGP toolkit. One
of the main purposes of us doing the open spec work is so that people don't
have to use anyone else's toolkits. If we assume everyone will use a PGP
toolkit, there's no need to do this work in the IETF. Simply let PGP, Inc.
specify what is PGP x.y and be done with it.
There are quite a few other toolkits that implement PGP, and I don't think
that Hal was implying that everyone would buy a toolkit from PGP, Inc.
Odds are that other implementors (especially since they do not have to pay
anyone any royalties for any of the algorithims if they implement them
themselves) will offer fully functional "PGP" capable toolkits.
Also, to defend the need for ASCII Armor parsing in a compatable
application I offer up the API to Exchange/Outlook. This MUA doesn't give
an application plugin the ability to process MIME attachments. The default
message interoperability mechanism is ASCII armored encrypted blocks in
the message body.
I beleive that the benefits given to having MUST understand ASCII armor,
and SHOULD be able to generate are great compared to the implementation
difficulty. Can we just include a source snippet in the draft and move on
to the next problem?
Gene Hoffman
PGP, Inc.