It isn't for "purity"; it is to make it easier for new
implementors to create compatible versions without
unnecessary impediments. They can obtain MIME toolkits
more easily than Armour ones. Or even just let mail
programs handle the encoding of the binary data.
Partdon me, this is not true. The only difference between
ASCII Armor and MIME's base64 are the armor header and the
CRC.
I do know this. So a MIME toolkit writes armour headers and CRCs?
To make 2.6 understand MIME encoded PGP messages,
just use mmencode -u -b | pgp -f - it will work on unix
systems; porting mmencode to other OS'es will be quite
trivial.
An excellent reason for saying we *don't* need armour.
The difficulty is not in reading it but in *writing* it. We don't want
new implementations to have to mess around with armour headers and CRCs.
mmencode shows a way that even PGP 2.6 could be made to work with MIME
rather than armour.
Ian.