Re: about MDCs etc (Re: Long Holiday?)

[Adam Back <aba@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jon writes:
> Signatures are different because there's a meaningful thing to do -- emit
> plaintext, and shrug over the sig -- which is a little different than the
> crypto, or compression, or whatever. But nonetheless, there are many
> failure and partial failure conditions, and an implementation that doesn't
> fail gracefully is broken.

note that pgp2.x suffers from this very problem.  this means that I
get messages from pgp5.x users which decrypt ok, but then fail to
display because of I think a DSS sig, so I have to dig out a unix
command line version of 5.x.

> This spec isn't a how-to-program manual, it's a format specification. By
> necessity it tells you a lot of what to do with the format, but there's a
> lot that this document can't tell an implementor.

just trying to avoid a repeat.

Adam