On Mar 17, 2015, at 7:18 AM, Werner Koch <wk(_at_)gnupg(_dot_)org> wrote:
On Mon, 16 Mar 2015 22:30, dshaw(_at_)jabberwocky(_dot_)com said:
A partial length is needed to handle content as a stream - say some program
that generates gigabytes of data (like a backup). Something large enough
that you really don't want to have to buffer the whole thing before
encrypting it.
And to support > 4GiB files on systems without LFS support.
Right, good point. I think it's safe to say there are enough uses for partial
length / streaming that it should be kept. Not all the world is email.
What if the encoding was really simple - something like 4 bytes always, and the
leftmost bit would mean "partial". So any packet 2^31 or less could be encoded
in one piece, but we could still do partial for those situations that needed
it. We could have any number of partial lengths, but it would always end with
a non-partial final length.
David
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