can gnupg symmetrically encrypt in a pgp-2 compatible way?

[Sotiris Vassilopoulos]

Hi all,

After reading the docs and loading the necessary 'idea' module, it is
unclear to me whether gnupg can do conventional symmetric encryption,
in a way that is pgp-2 compatible.


Doing the obvious
      gpg --verbose --rfc1991 --digest-algo=md5 --compress-algo 1 \
              --cipher-algo=idea -c -a -o encrypted.asc plaintext
doesn't seem to work, as
      pgp encrypted.asc
complains with
      Error:  Bad pass phrase.

Going the other way works and gnupg (given the right options) has no
problem decoding pgp-2 symmetrically encrypted messages.

Any ideas, or pointers for further reading ?

Thanks in advance.
--
Sotiris Vassilopoulos
BetaTech, Inc.  - Athens, Hellas