[Patch] internatinal domain names for email addresses

[David Shaw]

On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 05:16:27PM +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> David Shaw <dshaw at jabberwocky.com> writes:
> 
> >> 1) key selection:
> >> gpg --edit-key user at xn--fiq228c.idn.kuehne.cn
> >> gpg --edit-key user@??????.idn.kuehne.cn
> >
> > Perhaps I am missing something, but it strikes me that users should
> > never be using the punycode format directly.  This is an encoding to
> > accomodate software that cannot handle unicode.  Since GnuPG does
> > handle unicode, the user should be using the actual unicode name and
> > not translating it and then typing in the translation.
> 
> The IDNA specification require that any field that is IDN-unaware use
> the punycode format.  RFC 3490:
> 
>    An "IDN-unaware domain name slot" is defined in this document to be
>    any domain name slot that is not an IDN-aware domain name slot.
>    Obviously, this includes any domain name slot whose specification
>    predates IDNA.
> ...
>    2) Whenever a domain name is put into an IDN-unaware domain name slot
>       (see section 2), it MUST contain only ASCII characters.
> 
> The OpenPGP specification could be updated to say that the any RFC
> 2822 User-ID field may be considered IDN-aware.  More changes may be
> required as well.

Not impossible, I suppose, but it's a little tricky with OpenPGP since
OpenPGP user IDs do not have *any* "domain name slot".  User IDs are
just a UTF8 string.  The whole "Name <email at example.com>" syntax is
just tradition.

David