Re: Dash-escaping clarification

["Jeroen C. van Gelderen" <jeroen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday, Mar 7, 2003, at 20:53 US/Eastern, Adam Back wrote:
> See Michael Young's example: doing so breaks existing otherwise
> compliant implementations.

They probably can be fixed. And since OpenPGP isn't a finished standard 
yet this might be less of a problem in practice than it appears on 
paper.

> 'From ' is pretty much the only thing interesting to protect in an
> email message, as it is a separator between email messages.

It is also a protocol-specific hack. I strongly support simpler 
solutions if they achieve the same purpose. Allowing arbitrary lines to 
be escaped is simpler. OpenPGP too complex as-is.

> The '-' escape was just a way to protect nested signatures etc to
> avoid confusing the parser of the outer signatures.
>
> The rule's been that way since at least 1992, and I haven't seen any
> new chars needing quoting.  So it's survived the test of time.

That doesn't mean that a simpler rule isn't a better idea. In fact, 
ever since 1992, PGP has allowed for arbitrary lines to be escaped. So 
one could argue that the current OpenPGP standard is too restrictive.

At the very least we can argue that the OpenPGP way of defining 
escaping isn't sufficiently obvious that PGP get it wrong.

Cheers,
-J