Will Price wrote:
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I see no problem here and no need for any change to the draft or a
product. 66 columns is at least 10 columns shorter than any
conventional recommended line length. If your mailer wrapped that line,
it would be almost equally likely to wrap the ASCII armor itself (65
columns -- 11 less than the OpenPGP limit).
I've observed this problem many times, myself, but
it didn't occur in this recent case.
In addition, your claims are patently contrary to the exact words and
spirit of the draft. Please see section 6.3 where it says: "The encoded
output stream must be represented in lines of no more than 76
characters each."
You are correct, I did not see that part, so it
would appear that PGP 8 is within the letter of
the draft.
Thus, whatever the problem you are seeing is, and based on observing
the line length used in your own message on this topic, it appears to
be related specifically to a low limit somewhere in your configuration,
it is not a fault of PGP nor the OpenPGP draft.
This behaviour was observed with ordinary people
out there with ordinary mailers, not my own (which
is set to not slice lines at all). That is, users
failed to communicate because their mailers sliced
the lines.
I make no comment on whether any particular product
should change, rather, I was suggesting that there
be attention brought to the line length issue within
the draft. As line length in mailers is a moving
target, one can only be general and flexible.
As an aside, in the ascii armoured messages that
my company produces, we used to use the same or a
similar number as various other products (I guess
that would be about 65), but dropped it down to 48
about 2 years back because of continual problem
with mailers.
That's just an old observation, to match the new
one I've just seen in users' setups - if nobody
else has seen those problems then there isn't an
issue. I don't imagine that two data points are
representative.
iang