On Fri, 16 Dec 1994, Peter Williams wrote:
Does anyone feel that dropping the original RFC 1421-concept totally would
affect their vital interests, financial future, projects, deployed
implementations, egos, etc?
Dropping the whole concept, or just the message format and going with
MIME-PEM instead? If dropping the RFC 1421 message format is what you
mean, then I have no problem with throwing it in the nearest recycling
bin. If dropping the key identifier notations of RFC 1421 is what you
mean, then I'm a little hesitant. But before we do anything this drastic,
I think we should guage what deployment of the RFC 1421 format already
exists and determine how quickly this deployment can be upgraded.
The MIME encapsulation would make my job of implementating the format a
lot easier, and is a lot more flexible. As to the new key identifiers and
what-not: we can continue to argue till the cows come home about the
merits or what-not of that. I would be happy to see that move off into a
separate document and just deal with the encapsulation issues in the main
MIME-PEM document.
Would this step quickly bring about a dramatic increase in the number
of PEMed messages flying around by leaving only MIME-PEM concept in
the field of issue, regardless of its ambiguous operational qualities,
which might be worked on?
I couldn't say. Only time will tell.
Cheers,
Rhys.
--
Rhys Weatherley, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.
E-mail: rhys(_at_)fit(_dot_)qut(_dot_)edu(_dot_)au "net.maturity is knowing
when NOT to followup"