Re: [smime] [Technical Errata Reported] RFC2633 (5019)

[Blake Ramsdell <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, May 14, 2017 at 5:53 PM, Peter Gutmann
<[e-mail]> wrote:
> Or we could do something completely radical and ask Blake what he meant there.

I did a search through my email, and this may go back farther than my
records. From my standpoint I probably would have named it
id-aa-smimeEncryptionKeyPreference. I think that I had support from
one or more ASN.1 specialists to create the final name, and the name
wasn't really that critical for me, and it may have required
truncation due to ASN.1 compiler limitations or some other technical
thing. I see this discussion going all the way back to 1999 in an
ASN.1 module that Jim Schaad created. As has been pointed out, this is
used internally in technical tools for the construction, parsing, and
debug dumping out, so it has no real user-facing impact.

Channeling 1990's Blake, I think I didn't have a strong opinion about
what the human-readable name was for the attribute, the
interoperability was based on the object identifier and semantics
defined for it, and as long as the same OID ended up in the right
place, and if everyone uses the same one when they talk about it, the
world has order for me.

I have seen multiple people chime in with a position that this is not
a technically important fix, and I agree with that position.