Re: Trust Packets

[Len Sassaman <rabbi@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004, Ian Grigg wrote:

> Some random comments.
>
> One of the most perceptive decisions that the early PGP
> designers made was to not define trust.  This was a good
> decision because trust defies definition.  Trust is too
> much wrapped up in context of the user and her companion
> users, and the programmer can't really narrow that down
> usefully ahead of time.

I wouldn't say that they didn't define trust. PGP has internal trust
calculation algorithms, which happen not to be documented within the IETF.
I have always thought this unfortunate. I agree that trust calculation
should be orthogonal to the OpenPGP message format specification, but I do
wish that it were documented.