William H. Geiger III, <whgiii(_at_)invweb(_dot_)net>, writes:
Well, part of the problem we are going to have here is once these new keys
get uploaded to to the keyservers. It is my understanding that these new
packets will break 5.x version of PGP.
Actually PGP 6.0 tries to take some care to avoid breaking existing
software.
The new photo id packets are not uploaded to older keyservers by the
6.0 client. They are only uploaded to NAI's version 2 LDAP keyservers
(which is the version which ships with 6.0). This version of the
keyserver stores the photoid in a special data structure which will not
be downloaded pre 6.0 clients. Only PGP 6.0 knows to ask for data from
this special data structure where photo ids are kept.
When keys are exported explicitly, there is an option in the export
dialog box to cause the photo ids to be stripped, which defaults to the
backwards compatible mode. The user must go to the advanced preferences
to change this default.
Therefore most users will only be sending their photo ids to the LDAP
keyserver, which will only provide them to 6.0 clients. It is our
intention that photo ids will remain within the 6.0 "world" as much as
possible.
Hal Finney
Network Associates