[openpgp] Re: Specifying OpenPGP file extensions (and MIME type)?

[Daniel Huigens <[e-mail]>]

On Wednesday, December 18th, 2024 at 16:42, Andrew Gallagher wrote:

> I’d prefer to go in the other direction. Why do we have different grammars for messages and certificates? It prevents us from doing really simple stuff like appending a certificate to a message. If a message is a sequence of packets and a certificate is a sequence of packets - let’s just define an “OpenPGP packet sequence” and let the OpenPGP layer deal with the nuances of “message” vs “keyring” (certificate-ring?).

Hmm. I'm not sure I agree; if you want to put a certificate in a message
then you can just do that, put the certificate inside the (encrypted/
signed) message (e.g. as an attachment in the email context).
That seems cleaner to me.

There may be some sunk cost fallacy on my side as we spent a bunch of
effort in OpenPGP.js to make the parsing more strict / adhere to the
grammar more closely, e.g. `readMessage()` now throws if it includes a
key packet, and `readKey()` throws if it includes a data packet. While
this reduces flexibility in some sense, it also leads to better error
messages when you accidentally pass the wrong thing, for example.

Best,
Daniel