On 13/11/2025 12:35, Jakob Bohm via Gnupg-users wrote:
1. Since what version and year does gnupg accept the new framing of
packets that it can also accept with old framing? This controls when
senders will be able to use the new framing by default.
I believe gnupg has always supported the new framing - it was defined in
the first OpenPGP spec (RFC2440) in 1998, and gnupg 1.0 was released in
September 1999.
2. Since what year do all then-and-later commonly distributed OpenPGP
implementations accept the new framing of packets that gnupg can send
with old framing? This controls when gnupg will be able to send the new
framing by default.
AIUI the only code that cannot understand the new framing is in
pre-OpenPGP versions of commercial PGP. PGP5 had partial support for the
new framing, but note that PGP5 was incomplete in many other areas; for
example it only had partial support for V4 signatures and its OPS
handling was buggy. See Section 14 of RFC2440 for a list of caveats:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2440#section-14
Basically, if you are still using a version of commercial PGP that can't
handle modern packet framing, that's the *least* of your problems.
3. If either of the above questions are answered by "recent" (for
enterprise-frozen values of "recent"), should gnupg add options to
specify that the recipient follows a newer spec, such as rfc-4880, and
can thus decode the new framing of old packet types and can also handle
the new packet types introduced by that "newer spec"? Such an option
might be named --rfc4880plus or --no-rfc2440 (meaning don't implicitly
trigger option --rfc2440, but be careful not to create a contradictory
corner case where --rfc2440 is not the exact negative of --no-rfc2440).
Note that it was RFC2440 (1998) that specified modern packet framing
even for existing features; RFC4880 was the first spec that introduced
new features with a *requirement* for the modern framing. All
OpenPGP-compatible software SHOULD therefore accept the modern framing.
A
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