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On Fri, 12 Dec 1997 Lutz Donnerhacke wrote:
PGP/MIME in its current incarnation (RFC2015) _does not_ deal with
clearsigs.
I thought, that PGP/MIME does provide a multipart/signed type.
1. Well, multipart/signed might be called a clearsigning
but it's a kind of "detached clearsign", that is, one cannot just
save the whole msg in a file and verify in file mode as a last
resort.
I can save it. I save the whole message.
... and then manually insert armor, eh?
2. 2015 explicitly _forbids_ producing 8-bit first part in
multipart/signed.
RfC 2015 is somewhat badly designed, yes. I talked to Mark and he will fix
those points in the next version. Virtually all mailers handle other types
correctly.
Great.
I believe the general problem is not in that (3a) it is hard to
maintain certain language environment PGP performance, and even not
in that (3b) 8-bit texts require codepage info for
rendering/interpretation, but in that (3c) we deal with ways of
PGPing "objects" but have kinds of "objects" still undefined. My
understanding is that implicitly we slill have the two flavors of
object: "binary streams" and "texts". Texts require some
environment-specific info. One example currently defined is the way
EOL is represented on a certain platform. An example currently
undefined is charset info.
Correct. But the problem can be solved easily applying the OSI layers
strictly. Armor is Layer 6 as MIME. It has nothing to do with the message
format. It has nothing to do with hash calculation ...
Right, armor is OSI Layer 6 issue. It should go to other document,
but in such case we would have no armor definition in interim period
(after Formats start its standard track and before 2015 successor
starts its own).
Anyway, direct referencing to OSI Layers definitions (which RFCs?)
and indicating the layer(s) involved would enhance the draft.
4. Certainly, I would like "charset" to come back.
That means reimplementing MIME functionality in PGP seperatly.
Maybe you're right. But still... I'd like to have it as should, for
backword compatibility with 2.6i
--
-- Maksim Otstavnov <maksim(_at_)volga(_dot_)net>
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/1059/
-- -maintainer of The Russian PGP HomePage
-- (http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/1059/pgp-ru.html)