Re: [openpgp] "OpenPGP Simple"

[Jon Callas <[e-mail]>]

> 1) Sections of the RFC define what you might call "extras", such as the ASCII Armor (including a checksum unused elsewhere in the spec)

Certainly the ASCII Armor checksum is something that could go, since we don't need to worry so much about modem line noise. :-) But you have to know enough to ignore it.

> 2) There are a lot of backwards-compatibility things (old-style lengths, lots of different algorithms)
> 
> One of the things I've tried to work on to help in some of my use cases is a modular description for a subset of OpenPGP that is (hopefully) easier to immediately grok and/or implement.  It is at <https://github.com/singpolyma/openpgp-spec>

One of the things that I did once was to streamline an implementation my receiving a number of things well, like old-style packets and lengths, but only generating one thing (like five-byte lengths) on the grounds that if you move to generating a simplified format, you can then start doing usage surveys on when to phase out the old stuff.

But yes, having a simplified profile would be a great thing to do, I think.

	Jon