Jon writes:
Signatures are different because there's a meaningful thing to do -- emit
plaintext, and shrug over the sig -- which is a little different than the
crypto, or compression, or whatever. But nonetheless, there are many
failure and partial failure conditions, and an implementation that doesn't
fail gracefully is broken.
note that pgp2.x suffers from this very problem. this means that I
get messages from pgp5.x users which decrypt ok, but then fail to
display because of I think a DSS sig, so I have to dig out a unix
command line version of 5.x.
This spec isn't a how-to-program manual, it's a format specification. By
necessity it tells you a lot of what to do with the format, but there's a
lot that this document can't tell an implementor.
just trying to avoid a repeat.
Adam