ietf-openpgp
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Re: Forbidding 8bit text in Armor comments

2001-07-30 20:45:09

At 10:17 PM -0400 7/30/01, John Kane wrote:

The KDE / Mime team discovered rfc2440 implementations
which emit comments in the native 8-bit charset.
This breaks Mime unless they re-encode the entire block
in radix-64, which conflicts with a PGP/Mime requirement
that certain OpenPGP Armored formats MUST be left in
their native "----- BEGIN ... ----- END" format.

They can't use the '=FF' mechanism because it would
encode the '=' terminators in the armor.

PGP/Mime needs its ASCII Armor to be pure 7-bit ASCII.

Here are questions I have:

Is this an implementation problem, or a standard problem?

How many people outside of North America going to scream if we all of a
sudden limit it to 7-bit?

Is UTF-7 an answer, or a disgusting hack (having to parse two UTFs)?

        Jon