Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Wed, 15 May 1996 10:05:31 +0300 (EET DST) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: PGP fingerprints in CREDITS file? |
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On Tue, 14 May 1996, Michael K. Johnson wrote: > > Last I heard, Linus doesn't use PGP, which is why I didn't sign my > original mail. Certainly developers who send in their PGP public > keys would check the next version that is published and make sure > that they key that went in the CREDITS file is indeed their own.
Not only don't I use PGP, I don't want PGP-signed email, and I don't even want MIME-encoded email.
Too bad Zimmerman wasn't convicted - he wasn't guilty of breaking any silly cryptography laws, but he _was_ guilty of very bad programming. The PGP single-character escape stuff is broken, in bad taste, and should not be allowed (*).
The people who created MIME not only should be convicted, they should be shot on the spot. I have a reasonably mime-aware mailer (pine), but I _still_ have more problems with MIME mail than I ever had with non-MIME. I'm seriously considering refusing to even look at mails or patches that use MIME-encoding other than cleartext.
And don't tell me "MIME works fine" - I get quite enough emails, thank you very much. It doesn't work fine at all.
(*) PGP _should_ use a escape sequence, but using a single-character one (and a pretty normal one at that!) is arrogant and terminally stupid. It should use something like "---------- PGP-" as the escape-sequence at the start of a line (and _if_ it needs to escape it, it adds a full extra line of escape data in the above format), which would mean it wouldn't mess with any normal means of communication.
As it stands now, I have to edit the damn thing by hand or install a program that I don't want, and this results in me mostly ignoring the damn broken thing. Yes, I'm grumpy, and that's because I just I got _two_ mime-encoded mails that didn't even uudecode cleanly before I edited them by hand.
Linus
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