Re: Trailing whitespace and PGP/MIME

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:

> Ah.  Hm.  Er.  So what IS the right thing?  The MUST above is for
> PGP/MIME, yes, but the _reason_ the MUST is there in the document is
> about as valid for plain PGP as it is for PGP/MIME, I think, arguing
> that the obvious approach is the right.

It shouldn't be as valid for inline PGP.  PGP implementations generally
handle trailing spaces without difficulty when processing attached
signatures (by stripping them before processing the message).  The
behavior is different than when they process detached signatures, but I'm
not sure that we care.

> One (non-)solution is to warn the user whenever the message content
> may not work reliably with plain PGP and ask the user if she wants to
> continue, or use PGP/MIME instead.

This is going to get really annoying for people who use inline signatures
with a sig delimiter.

The real solution is for people to stop using the broken inline PGP
signature standard and switch to PGP/MIME so that the true structure of
their messages is exposed to software, but it's so hard to convince people
of that....

> There are many things on this list now, e.g., non-ASCII, trailing
> unencoded SPC, data that look dash escaped.  This would be a useful
> feature, but just move the problem into the face of the user instead of
> solving it, and I doubt most users understand nor want to understand the
> problem.

Yup.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>