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Re: Armour Rationale?

2006-01-05 08:05:44

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 02:13:48PM +0000, Ben Laurie wrote:

If the rationale for allowing trailing whitespace in armoured text is
that it may be added by MUAs or MTAs, then shouldn't armoured headers
and trailers also allow trailing whitespace (yes, I have seen this in
the wild!).

I'd say yes, this should be allowed (and ignored).  GPG actually has
special code to deal with it:

    /* Some Windows environments seem to add whitespace to the end of
       the line, so we strip it here.  This becomes strict if
       --rfc2440 is set since 2440 reads "The header lines, therefore,
       MUST start at the beginning of a line, and MUST NOT have text
       following them on the same line."  It is unclear whether "text"
       refers to all text or just non-whitespace text. */

I'd be quite happy if the draft language was something like:

     The header lines, therefore, MUST start at the beginning of a
     line, and MUST NOT have non-whitespace text following them on
     the same line.

  (that is, define the text as "non-whitespace").

David

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