Re: PGP fingerprints in CREDITS file?

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@cs.helsinki.fi)
Wed, 15 May 1996 10:05:31 +0300 (EET DST)


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