--textmode again.

[Ingo Klöcker]

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On Thursday, 5. July 2001 19:41, Leif E. Olson wrote:
> We recentently converted all of our UNIX and DOS scripts to use gpg
> instead of pgp.  We always used the -t (textmode) option in pgp and
> never had any problems.  Now when we use --textmode with gpg we are
> running into a couple.  It seems that pgp was smart enough not to try
> to do any textmode translations if the file was binary where as gpg
> does and will mess up things such as tar files if we leave text mode
> on.  We use the same set of scripts for encrypting then sending or
> receiving then decrypting various binary and text files between our
> many UNIX and DOS ftp servers.  Also we use it for encrypting fixed
> line length files and gpg seems to mess with the white space in
> textmode whereas pgp did not.  Is there any way to make gpg's
> textmode act like pgp's?

Are you talking about PGP 5.x? This version was very buggy. If the 
- --textmode option is given the input has to be treated as text. How 
should GnuPG differentiate between text and binary files? AFAIK PGP 5.x 
treated all files which contained 8-bit characters as binary. But this 
is completely stupid because all special characters used in languages 
other than english are 8-bit characters which means that all text which 
is not written in english would be treated as binary.
Please note that GnuPG's way to treat text files complies with the 
OpenPGP specification while PGP 5.x does not comply with it.
According to the OpenPGP spec trailing white spaces have to be removed 
in text mode before signing. If you don't want them to be removed don't 
use the text mode.

Regards,
Ingo
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