Re: [openpgp] Deprecating compression support

[Peter Gutmann <[e-mail]>]

Jon Callas <joncallas=[e-mail]> writes:

>One of these differences is that zip-style compression is just not as useful
>now. 

There is one situation in which PGP was at one point widely used but for which
I don't have much current data (more recent than about five years ago) and
that's banking and medical EDI (so X12/HL7), where compression is a required
feature, because you're moving potentially multi-megabyte text files via FTP
to/from mainframes over slow links.

Outside of that rather specialised use, there's no reason to use compression.

>The compression inside of OpenPGP is also hard to implement correctly. The
>default compression, the “DEFLATE” option is a modified implementation of
>ZIP-style programs from the era of the late 1980s. 

To give some background to this, the original PGP use LHarc because it was
sort-of free.  When the first InfoZip implementations came out, Phil correctly
guessed that it would become the universal standard based on the popularity of
MSDOS Pkzip.  However, what went into PGP 2 was a pre-pre-pre-release of Zip,
whose format didn't settle down completely until after PGP was released.  I
think the only reason why deflateInit() still accepts -13 as a compression
parameter is to trigger the PGP 2-compatibility mode in the compressor.

>The underlying reality is even worse. Go look at section 5.6 of 2440, and
>there are interoperability hints for working with PGP2 because it had further
>limitations in it for internal table sizes. 

That was due to 16-bit segments on the 8086, even then you had all sorts of
hacks to get things to work.

Peter.