I have a proposal for the group in a effort to put the Ascii-Armor
question to rest.
I will release my subroutines w/source for ascii-armor encoding/decoding
into the public domain. That way everyone will have them available to use
as they wish free of charge.
Will this be an acceptable solution to the "problem"??
Such freely available toolkits already exist (see, for example,
http://www.systemics.com/software/cryptix-java/)
This does not alter the fact that implementors would need to download,
understand, and adapt such code to work in their subsequently bloated
application.
Paul Hoffman wrote, quoting you:
This is silly, I really can't see anyone saying "I'm not going to support
PGP because it uses ASCII armor encoding".
By itself, no. But if we require lots of other things that make it that
much harder for people to implement (such as requiring them being able to
handle all the earlier packet formats), they will probably have the same
attitude as they have had up to now: "I won't bother". That hurts all of
us, and is one of the driving forces for us to make a simple and useful spec.
Ian.