Can --textmode break things ?

[David Shaw]

On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 05:45:26PM -0500, Jason_Mantor at hesc.com wrote:

>       I've just come across an interoperability issue and I'm hoping
> someone else has some experience that'll help me out.  We're using
> GnuPG 1.2.x on Windows NT 4.0.  The trading partner in question is
> using PGP E-biz Server 7.5x on a mainframe (390, I think.)  They are
> unable to decrypt files from my production system and can only
> decrypt files that I've manually encrypted with an additional
> -textmode argument.  All of the files that go through these systems
> are DOS-ASCII text files.  There's no reason it should ever need to
> handle un-encoded binary data and the industry specs require
> RFC-2440 compliant encryption packages be used.  Here's my real
> question : Considering the above, can I safely add --textmode to my
> gpg options file and use this for all my trading partners that are
> using PGP, or could that break things ?

If you can guarantee that you will never send anything that isn't
text, you can safely stick --textmode in your options file.

David