Re: [openpgp] Fingerprints

[Christoph Anton Mitterer <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, 2015-04-15 at 12:11 -0700, Jon Callas wrote:
> There was a proposal that floated around that defined an extended
> fingerprint to be an algorithm number followed by the actual bits.
> For example, ASCII-fied 23:ABCDEF0123...FF. There's an obvious binary
> representation. There's an obvious way to truncate that as well --
> just decide if you truncate little-endian or big. (Personally, despite
> being a little-endian bigot, this is a place where network byte order
> is even to me the obvious win.)
> The major advantage of this is that you can define it and then you
> never have to change it again. We don't have to have any arguments
> over what hash function is proper to use, etc. An implementation can
> decide to support or not support whatever.
+1

But shouldn't one define better the number to be either a string?
Sure a one byte number with 255 possible future algorithms seem plenty
enough, but people also once thought that about 32bit IPv4 addresses,
two digit year numbers and so on.

:-)

Cheers,
Chris.