Re: Trailing whitespace and PGP/MIME

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:

>> 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).

> Even pre-OpenPGP implementations?  E.g., PGP 2.x.

I can't speak for all of them, but PGP 2.x does indeed do that as long as
you give it the -t flag.  Whether the standard tools for checking such
messages do that or not, I don't know (but they should).

> RFC 1991 does not mention "whitespace", "trailing", or "strip".  Gnus
> currently claim to support them, although I'm not sure this is a good
> idea, nor if anyone actually uses PGP 2.x.

It's still relatively widely used for newsgroup control messages just
because that's the PGP that tale originally used, nearly all the keys are
RSA, and GnuPG couldn't handle RSA keys until about a year ago.  Outside
of that, I'm seeing rapidly diminishing popularity.

> For pure-ASCII, no trailing whitespace, no possibly dash escaped text,
> use of inline isn't that bad, especially for announcements stored in
> files -- PGP/MIME is too e-mail specific to be used in that case.

Point.

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