5.8. Marker Packet (Obsolete Literal Packet) (Tag 10)
An experimental version of PGP used this packet as the Literal
packet, but no released version of PGP generated Literal packets
with this tag. With PGP 5.x, this packet has been re-assigned and is
reserved for use as the Marker packet.
The body of this packet consists of:
- The three octets 0x50, 0x47, 0x50 (which spell "PGP" in UTF-8).
Such a packet MUST be ignored when received. It may be placed at
the beginning of a message that uses features not available in PGP
2.6.x in order to cause that version to report that newer software
is necessary to process the message.
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I would modify this to read:
...
| The body of this packet contains:
- The three octets 0x50, 0x47, 0x50 (which spell "PGP" in UTF-8).
|
| Which may be followed by other UTF-8 characters which implementations
| MUST ignore, but MAY append for use as a comment.
...
The reason for this is that I don't want anyone requiring the length be
exactly 3, so this marker packet could be used to indicate which
implementation created the message or other information, e.g.
0xa8, strlen, "PGP OpenPrivacy v0.9"
0xa8, strlen, "PGP OPGP Beta 99m"
Much like ascii armor contains.
I want to leave the "PGP" at the beginning so that it functions as an
identifier, i.e. 0xa8 xx 'P' 'G' 'P' could be used to find PGP files.
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