1) Sections of the RFC define what you might call "extras", such as the ASCII
Armor (including a checksum unused elsewhere in the spec)
Certainly the ASCII Armor checksum is something that could go, since we don't
need to worry so much about modem line noise. :-) But you have to know enough
to ignore it.
2) There are a lot of backwards-compatibility things (old-style lengths, lots
of different algorithms)
One of the things I've tried to work on to help in some of my use cases is a
modular description for a subset of OpenPGP that is (hopefully) easier to
immediately grok and/or implement. It is at
<https://github.com/singpolyma/openpgp-spec>
One of the things that I did once was to streamline an implementation my
receiving a number of things well, like old-style packets and lengths, but only
generating one thing (like five-byte lengths) on the grounds that if you move
to generating a simplified format, you can then start doing usage surveys on
when to phase out the old stuff.
But yes, having a simplified profile would be a great thing to do, I think.
Jon
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