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In <199710240850(_dot_)EAA03516(_at_)users(_dot_)invweb(_dot_)net>, at 0145 on
97.10.24, William H.
Geiger III <whgiii(_at_)invweb(_dot_)net> wrote:
The term "packet" is a well known and well defined in the PGP comunity. I
see no reason for changing this now. I see little chance of a PGP "packet"
and a network "packet" being confused for one or another as we are
describing document formats here not network protocols.
This position is understandable as long as PGP stays in its own little
world. But IETF adoption now brings PGP into the much larger world of
networking, where the term "packet" is already overloaded and frequently
misused.
The standard connotation of "packet" (and yes, the word has a specific
meaning in the ISO/IEC/CCITT standards community) and the commonly-accepted
overloaded use both refer to separately-transmittable messages containing
addressing and control information. This is not the case for the PGP
message components, which are more correctly called message "elements".
The term "packet" is supposed to refer to an OSI layer three (network layer)
protocol data unit (message). It has sometimes been misused to refer to a
layer two (data link layer) protocol data unit, where the proper term is
"frame"; this confusion was promulgated by the original Ethernet Blue Book
specs in 1980, which referred to Ethernet frames as packets.
Whatever the scope, the term "packet" refers to a concept within the
communications layers (layers one to four), and not within the layers which
provide service enhancements (layers five to seven). PGP clearly belongs to
this latter category (probably layer six, the presentation layer), where the
communications layer term "packet' is, has been, and remains, inappropriate.
Tom Phinney
IEEE 802, ISO and IEC standards contributor and sometimes editor
____
PGP: pub 1024 RSA:0xFA7148F1 DSS/EG:0x8A297007 on keyservers
Fingerprints: RSA: 2A85 3644 B773 3859 DA00 E429 4F79 840D
DSS/EG: 9CE1 9906 1760 970B 6211 9D85 8B56 C548 8A29 7007
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